In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Zeus sends Pandora to humanity as punishment for Prometheus’s theft.
Zeus is the chief Olympian god and ruler of the gods in Greek mythology. Hesiod’s account presents him as responding to Prometheus’s deception and theft of fire. Rather than limiting the punishment to Prometheus, Zeus causes a new woman to be created and sent among humans.
The gods contribute to Pandora’s preparation, and Zeus gives her to Epimetheus despite Prometheus’s warning. The story then connects her arrival with the release of evils that had previously been kept away from humanity. This is why Pandora’s myth is often treated as an origin story for human suffering and labor.
The episode is not a story about Hades’s underworld or Poseidon’s sea. Those gods appear elsewhere in Greek mythology, but Zeus is the authority who initiates Pandora’s punishment narrative in Hesiod.