The container in Pandora’s myth was originally called a pithos, a large storage jar.
Hesiod’s Works and Days describes Pandora opening a pithos that held evils destined for humanity. A pithos was a substantial ceramic vessel used in the ancient Greek world for storing goods such as grain, oil, or wine. It was not the small hinged box suggested by modern illustrations.
The “box” wording arose through a translation tradition. The Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus translated the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That choice helped establish the familiar phrase Pandora’s box in European languages, even though the earliest surviving Greek account uses a jar.
The distinction matters because the pithos is part of the myth’s original material imagery. Many modern retellings preserve the idea of a sealed container but replace the large storage jar with a decorative box. Both versions refer to the same story, but pithos is the historically specific term found in the ancient tradition.