The ancient Greeks called Pandora’s jar a pithos before later retellings turned it into a box.
A pithos was a large ceramic storage container used in the ancient Greek world, commonly for products such as grain, oil, or wine. Hesiod used the Greek word pithos when describing the container entrusted to Pandora. The vessel was therefore an everyday type of storage jar, not a small hinged chest.
The “box” wording became standard through a Renaissance translation. The influential sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus translated or interpreted the Greek vessel as a Latin pyxis, a small box, and that choice shaped later European languages. The original Greek term remains important because it shows how a translation helped transform a jar into one of mythology’s most familiar boxes.