In the earliest Greek version of Pandora’s story, Pandora opened a pithos, a large storage jar.
The word pithos appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days, the oldest surviving literary source for the Pandora story. A pithos was a substantial ceramic container used in ancient Greece for storing materials such as grain, oil, or wine. It was not the small lidded box shown in many modern illustrations.
The “box” wording became widespread through later translation and retelling. Erasmus’s Latin rendering helped establish the familiar idea of a box, even though the original Greek object was a jar. This distinction matters because the vessel was an ordinary household storage container in the myth’s ancient setting. The phrase “Pandora’s box” is now fixed in English, while “Pandora’s jar” more closely reflects Hesiod’s wording.