In 1508, Erasmus’s Latin translation helped turn Pandora’s jar into the familiar idea of a box. Erasmus rendered the Greek pithos as pyxis, a Latin term associated with a box or container, influencing the phrase that later became standard in English.
Hesiod’s original account describes a pithos, generally understood as a large storage jar. The shift from jar to box was therefore a translation change rather than a detail supplied by the oldest surviving version of the myth.
Erasmus was a major Renaissance humanist, and his work helped circulate classical stories among European readers. His Adagia, a collection of proverbs and sayings, played an important role in preserving and popularizing classical expressions, including the Pandora image.
The modern idiom now means an action that creates many unexpected problems. The expression’s history shows how a single lexical choice can reshape popular memory of an ancient story. The date 1508 refers to the influential Erasmus tradition, not to the original composition of Hesiod’s poem.