Hesiod narrates Pandora’s creation and the opening of her container most fully in Works and Days. The poem is a didactic work about labor, justice, agriculture, seafaring, and the difficult conditions of human life.
The Pandora episode appears in the poem’s account of why suffering exists. Zeus orders the creation of a woman whose arrival will bring a destructive consequence to humanity, linking the story to the conflict between Zeus and Prometheus. The narrative describes the gods contributing features and gifts before Pandora is sent to Epimetheus.
Pandora also appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, but Works and Days supplies the fuller version of the jar episode and its explanation of human misery. This is why references to Pandora’s box usually rely on Works and Days rather than treating the story as an episode from Homer. The poem is traditionally attributed to Hesiod and is generally dated to the Archaic period.