Erasmus published the Adagia passage that helped popularize “Pandora’s box” in 1508.
Desiderius Erasmus’s Adagia was a major Renaissance collection of proverbs and classical sayings. In its 1508 edition, Erasmus used the Latin expression pyxis Pandorae, or “Pandora’s box,” when discussing the ancient myth. This wording helped shift the familiar object away from Hesiod’s large jar, the pithos, and toward the box or casket known in later European languages.
The change was influential because Renaissance readers often encountered Greek mythology through Latin scholarship and translation. Once the box wording became established, artists, writers, and educators repeated it even though the earliest Greek account used a different term.
The date 1508 refers to the relevant early edition of Erasmus’s Adagia, not to the origin of the Greek myth itself. Pandora’s story was already ancient by more than a millennium.