In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora originally opened a jar.
The famous expression “Pandora’s box” comes from a later translation tradition, but Hesiod’s Greek text describes a pithos, a large storage jar or earthenware vessel. The word was translated into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box, helping create the familiar English phrase.
Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in ancient Greece, tells how Pandora’s vessel released evils into the human world. The story does not present the container as a small modern box. Large jars were common practical objects in the ancient Mediterranean, used for storing goods such as grain, oil, or wine.
The wording matters because “Pandora’s jar” is closer to the earliest surviving literary account. Modern retellings, paintings, films, and everyday speech overwhelmingly use “box,” so many readers assume that was the original object. The common phrase is therefore a famous example of how translation can reshape a myth.