In which Hesiod poem does the most complete early Pandora story appear?

The most complete early Pandora story appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

Works and Days is a didactic Greek poem concerned with work, justice, farming, social conduct, and the human condition. Within that framework, Hesiod describes how Zeus responds to Prometheus’s theft of fire by arranging the creation of Pandora and sending her to Epimetheus.

The poem includes the episode of the container whose contents escape into the world, leaving hope behind. It is therefore the key ancient source for the form of the myth most familiar today. Hesiod’s Theogony supplies related genealogical and divine context, but Works and Days tells the narrative more fully.

The title is sometimes confused with Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey because all three belong to ancient Greek literature. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a Roman work written centuries later and does not serve as the earliest source of the Pandora story.