In Hesiod’s Works and Days, pithos is the Greek word for the container associated with Pandora.
A pithos was a large storage jar used in the ancient Greek world, commonly for commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod’s account describes Pandora opening a vessel of this general type, not a small hinged box. The Greek term is important because it explains why many scholars and translations call the object a jar.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” became established later, especially through European retellings. A frequently cited influence is the sixteenth-century Latin humanist Erasmus, whose wording helped shift the image toward a box. That later label is now standard in English even though it does not closely reproduce Hesiod’s object.
A krater was a mixing vessel, an amphora commonly had two handles, and a kylix was a drinking cup. Those objects belong to Greek pottery vocabulary, but none is the specific container named in this mythological tradition.