The Pandora story is told in Works and Days as part of Hesiod’s explanation for human suffering.
Works and Days is an archaic Greek didactic poem concerned with justice, farming, labor, and the proper organization of life. Hesiod places the Pandora narrative within a larger account of why humans must work and why evils exist in the world.
The poem describes Zeus’s punishment after Prometheus gives fire to humanity. It presents Pandora as a divinely made woman and recounts the opening of the storage jar. The evils released from it help explain the hardships that now affect human life, while hope remains inside.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days contains the fuller narrative. This distinction matters because modern summaries often name “Greek mythology” as their source without identifying the poem that preserves the most complete ancient version.