The fullest surviving ancient literary version of Pandora’s story is found in Hesiod’s Works and Days.
Works and Days is an ancient Greek didactic poem usually dated to the Archaic period. It combines advice about farming and seasonal work with reflections on justice, labor, social conduct, and humanity’s difficult relationship with the gods. The Pandora episode appears within that broader discussion rather than as an isolated fairy tale.
The poem describes how Zeus responds to Prometheus’s theft of fire and how Pandora becomes connected with the troubles affecting mortals. It also preserves the detail that the container was a jar and that hope remained inside after the evils escaped.
The Theogony, another work attributed to Hesiod, contains related material about Prometheus and Pandora but is not the fullest narrative source. The Odyssey, Iliad, and Argonautica are different Greek poems and do not provide the canonical account of Pandora opening the jar.