In the Greek myth of Pandora, the container was traditionally called a pithos. A pithos was a large storage jar used in the ancient Greek world, commonly for grain, oil, or wine.
Hesiod’s Works and Days describes Pandora receiving a large jar, not a small hinged box. The Greek word pithos refers to this kind of substantial earthenware vessel. The jar became associated with Pandora because opening it released troubles into the human world.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose later through a translation tradition. Renaissance readers encountered Latin and other retellings that used words for a box or container, and the box image gradually replaced the original jar in popular culture.
This distinction matters because the myth’s earliest surviving account does not present Pandora with a box in the modern sense. “Pithos” is therefore the historically precise term for the vessel in Hesiod’s version.