In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora. The poem, composed in Archaic Greece, describes how the gods created and equipped Pandora before she entered the human world.
Hesiod’s version is important because it is the oldest substantial surviving narrative about Pandora. He also discusses her in Theogony, although Works and Days gives the fuller story of her creation, marriage to Epimetheus, and the opening of the jar.
Pandora is often linked broadly with Greek mythology in modern retellings, but the familiar “box” story comes primarily through later translations and adaptations. Hesiod describes a pithos, a large storage vessel, rather than a small box.
Homer is another foundational Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the main Pandora narrative. Aeschylus and Ovid belong to later literary traditions.