A pithos held the evils in the original Greek version of Pandora’s story.
A pithos was a large Greek storage jar, commonly used for commodities such as grain, wine, or oil. These vessels could be substantial enough for storage and were often kept partly buried or placed in storerooms. Hesiod uses the word pithos when describing the container associated with Pandora.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose later through translation history. In the sixteenth century, the humanist Erasmus translated the Greek term into Latin as pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That wording helped establish the expression used in many modern languages, even though the earliest literary account describes a jar.
An amphora is another Greek vessel, usually narrower and equipped with two handles, but it is not the specific container named in the Pandora myth. The pithos detail is one of the story’s most commonly repeated historical corrections.