In the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora, the Greek poet Hesiod tells her story.
Hesiod describes Pandora in two works, Theogony and Works and Days, composed during the archaic period of Greek literature. Works and Days gives the fuller narrative associated with the vessel and explains Pandora’s arrival as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus’s theft of fire. Theogony also refers to Pandora and the consequences of Prometheus’s actions.
Hesiod was not the author of every later version of the myth. Greek and Roman writers, artists, and modern storytellers adapted the story over many centuries. Homer, another major early Greek poet, is not the source of the surviving Pandora narrative, which makes him a plausible but incorrect answer.
The wording “earliest surviving literary account” is important. Earlier oral traditions may have circulated, but no earlier written Pandora story has survived in a comparable form. Hesiod’s poems are the foundational literary sources for the myth known today.