In which Hesiod poem is the fullest surviving account of Pandora’s opened container?

Works and Days contains the fullest surviving Hesiodic account of Pandora’s opened container.

Hesiod’s Works and Days is a didactic poem that combines advice about farming and seafaring with moral lessons and myths about human life. Its Pandora passage explains why people experience toil, illness, and other hardships after the gods’ conflict with Prometheus.

Theogony also mentions Pandora and the punishment connected with her creation, but its treatment is briefer and embedded in a genealogy of gods. Works and Days provides the better-known sequence: Zeus orders Pandora’s creation, the gods equip her, she joins Epimetheus, and the container is opened.

The poem is usually dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, though scholars cannot assign a precise year. It is one of the earliest surviving Greek literary works. The text says pithos, meaning a large jar, rather than the modern “box.” That detail comes from the Greek poem itself, while “Pandora’s box” is a later traditional expression.