In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora opens a jar rather than a box.
The Greek word used for the container is pithos, a large storage jar commonly used in the ancient Mediterranean for goods such as grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod’s story says that the jar contains evils or troubles that escape into the human world when Pandora opens it. Hope remains inside after the other contents depart.
The phrase “Pandora’s box” comes from a later Latin translation tradition. The humanist Erasmus translated the Greek vessel with the Latin word pyxis, meaning a box or small container, and that wording strongly influenced later European retellings. The modern phrase therefore does not reproduce the object described in Hesiod’s Greek text.
Ancient Greek pottery and storage jars varied greatly in size and design, so illustrations do not always resemble one another. The important identification is the pithos: a jar, not a locked chest. This distinction is one of the clearest differences between the original myth and its familiar English form.