Works and Days is Hesiod’s poem containing the fullest ancient account of Pandora’s jar.
The poem is a didactic work concerned with farming, justice, labor and human life. Within that setting, Hesiod explains why suffering and hardship exist after Prometheus takes fire for humanity. Pandora’s arrival and the opening of the jar form part of this broader moral and social argument.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony, another major early Greek poem. However, Works and Days supplies the better-known narrative details, including Pandora’s relationship with Epimetheus and the escape of evils from the vessel.
Works and Days is not an epic poem like Homer’s Iliad. Its subject matter is more practical and instructional, although it includes mythological stories. Ancient manuscripts and later scholarship preserve the poem as one of the key sources for understanding early Greek ideas about work, justice, agriculture and divine order.