In Hesiod’s Works and Days, who opens Pandora’s container?

In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora opens the container herself. The poem says that she removes the vessel’s lid, allowing the troubles kept inside to escape into the world, while hope remains within.

Hesiod’s account does not call the object a box in the modern sense. The Greek word is pithos, a large storage jar. Later retellings and a Renaissance translation helped establish the familiar phrase “Pandora’s box,” which changed the image in popular culture.

The myth appears in Works and Days, a didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod and generally dated to the seventh century BCE. Pandora’s opening of the jar follows her arrival among humans as part of Zeus’s punishment after Prometheus gives people fire.

Some versions emphasize curiosity as the reason she opens it, but Hesiod’s text does not use the modern slogan “curiosity killed the cat” or present the episode as a simple moral about curiosity. The exact treatment of hope is also debated, because the poem leaves unclear why it remains inside.