Hesiod’s Works and Days tells Pandora’s creation and the opening of her container in greatest detail.
The poem is a didactic work combining advice about farming, justice, labor, and human conduct with mythological examples. Its Pandora episode explains why suffering and difficult work exist in the human condition after Prometheus takes fire from the gods.
The Theogony also mentions Pandora, but only briefly. Works and Days describes the gods’ contributions to her making and recounts how she releases troubles into the world. That fuller account is why this poem is normally cited as the main literary source for the Pandora myth.
The poem is not a simple adventure narrative. Hesiod uses Pandora’s story as part of a moral and cosmic explanation of humanity’s worsening circumstances. Modern summaries sometimes combine details from both poems and later retellings.