Pithos is the ancient Greek word often translated as the jar in Pandora’s myth.
Hesiod’s Works and Days uses the Greek noun pithos for the large storage vessel associated with Pandora. A pithos was a substantial container used in the ancient Mediterranean for storing commodities such as grain, wine, or oil. It was not normally a small gift box.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed through a translation tradition. The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam translated the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning box, rather than preserving the more accurate sense of a jar or large storage vessel. English then popularized the “box” wording.
The container’s interpretation is important because the myth’s central action depends on opening and closing it. Ancient art and later illustrations often depict different kinds of vessels, so there is no single universally fixed visual design. The pithos term is the specific ancient-language detail that distinguishes Hesiod’s vessel from the modern phrase.