In the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, Zeus ordered the other gods to create Pandora.
Hesiod places Pandora’s creation within Zeus’s punishment of humanity. Prometheus had deceived Zeus over the division of an animal sacrifice and later stole fire for humans. In response, Zeus arranged for a beautiful woman to be fashioned from earth and endowed by several gods with different qualities. This divine construction gives the myth its distinctive sequence: Pandora is not born in an ordinary human way but assembled through the actions of Olympus.
The story appears most fully in Hesiod’s Works and Days, composed in archaic Greece, and a related version appears in Theogony. Zeus’s role is sometimes simplified in modern children’s retellings, which focus on Pandora’s action rather than the earlier divine plan. In Hesiod, however, the vessel and its contents form part of a deliberate punishment.
Prometheus remains important because his theft of fire sets the plot in motion, but he is not the god who commands Pandora’s creation. Zeus is the ruler who initiates the scheme and controls the punishment.