Erasmus helped turn Pandora’s jar into the familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” in 1508.
The ancient Greek version uses pithos, a large jar. In his collection Adagia, the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam rendered the container with the Latin word pyxis while discussing the proverb associated with Pandora. Pyxis can refer to a box or small container, and the influential translation helped establish the wording that later became standard in European languages.
This does not mean Erasmus invented the whole Pandora myth. Hesiod had described the story roughly two millennia earlier. Erasmus’s contribution was especially important in the transmission of the container image. Modern retellings therefore preserve an expression shaped by Renaissance translation rather than by the exact noun used in the earliest surviving Greek account.