The earliest surviving detailed version of Pandora’s story appears in Hesiod’s poem Works and Days.
Hesiod composed Works and Days in archaic Greece, generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. The poem combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining why human life contains hardship. Pandora’s creation and the opening of her container occur in that moral and agricultural setting.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora-related material in the Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative. It describes the gods creating the first woman and sending her to Epimetheus as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire.
Readers sometimes assume the story comes from Homer because Homer’s epics are better known internationally. Pandora’s surviving literary story, however, is associated chiefly with Hesiod, not the Iliad or the Odyssey.