In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora closed the vessel immediately after opening it. The action comes after the evils escape and before hope can leave the container, according to the surviving account.
This brief sequence is crucial to the myth’s ending. Pandora is not described as smashing the jar or permanently losing it. Instead, she opens it, the contents spread into the world, and she closes it again. The surviving hope therefore remains associated with the vessel.
Translations vary in their precise wording and in whether they call the object a jar, vessel, or box. Those differences do not change the basic action in Hesiod’s narrative. The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” comes from later tradition, while the ancient Greek text’s container is generally understood as a storage jar.
The detail also matters because it distinguishes the myth from modern stories in which a container is destroyed once opened. Pandora’s act is a brief opening followed by closure, not an irreversible breaking of the object.