In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Greek name for Pandora’s large storage jar is pithos.
A pithos was a substantial storage container used in the ancient Greek world, commonly for commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod’s choice of vessel is therefore important: the original story does not describe a small hinged box.
The “box” in the modern expression came from a sixteenth-century Latin translation by Erasmus, who rendered the Greek term with the Latin word pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That influential translation shaped the phrase used in English and many other languages.
The change is more than a vocabulary detail. A large storage jar fits the agricultural and household world of Hesiod’s poem, while “box” has become so familiar that modern retellings often treat it as the original wording. The pithos is one of the clearest examples of how translation can reshape a famous myth.