Pandora appears in Works and Days in the story of Prometheus’s punishment and humanity’s troubles.
Works and Days is attributed to Hesiod and combines practical advice with myths about justice, labor, and the human condition. Its Pandora episode follows the conflict involving Prometheus and Zeus. Zeus orders the gods to create Pandora, and her opening of the container becomes the poem’s explanation for why suffering and toil affect human life.
The poem is distinct from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which focus on the Trojan War and Odysseus’s return. Pandora is not a central Homeric character. Hesiod’s Theogony also mentions Pandora and her creation, but Works and Days provides the famous account of the opened container and the remaining hope. Because the two Hesiodic poems overlap in subject but differ in emphasis, identifying the exact poem is important when citing the ancient source.