The usual English title of Hesiod’s poem containing the detailed Pandora jar episode is Works and Days.
Works and Days is an archaic Greek didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod. It combines advice about farming, household conduct, justice, and the organization of the year with mythic narratives. The account of Pandora, the opening of the storage jar, and the survival of hope appears in this poem rather than as a full episode in Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey.
The poem’s Pandora passage follows the story of Prometheus and Zeus’s punishment of humanity. Hesiod uses the myth to explain why suffering and labor are part of human existence. The narrative is therefore embedded in a broader moral and agricultural work, not presented as a standalone fairy tale.
Readers sometimes cite “Hesiod” without distinguishing his two major surviving poems. The Theogony discusses Pandora’s creation in a shorter and differently focused passage, while Works and Days supplies the famous container episode. That distinction identifies the most specific ancient source for the jar story.