In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the poet who describes Pandora as the source of troubles for humanity is Hesiod himself. The poem presents her arrival as part of Zeus’s punishment after Prometheus helps mortals obtain fire.
Works and Days is a Greek didactic poem concerned with farming, justice, labor, and the proper organization of human life. The Pandora episode appears within that wider discussion of why human existence includes toil, suffering, and unavoidable hardship.
Hesiod also tells a related version of Pandora’s creation in the Theogony, but the jar episode is most fully associated with Works and Days. The two poems are among the earliest surviving Greek literary sources for the myth.
Homer is sometimes named because he is another major early Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the standard Pandora jar narrative. Ovid and Virgil wrote in Latin and belong to a later Roman literary tradition.