The Greek word for Pandora’s container is pithos, a large storage jar often translated inaccurately as “box.”
In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the container is described with the Greek noun pithos. A pithos was a substantial ceramic vessel used in the ancient Greek world to store commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. It could be large enough to stand taller than a person and was a practical household or agricultural container.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed after the Renaissance. The influential sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus translated the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That translation helped establish the wording now used in English and many other languages.
This translation history does not change the central story: Pandora opens the vessel and releases troubles into the world. The modern phrase is therefore based on a long-standing interpretive shift rather than on Hesiod’s exact object. The distinction matters because archaeological and literary evidence points to a jar, not a hinged box.