Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” through a sixteenth-century Latin translation.
The earliest Greek account describes a pithos, a large storage jar. When the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the story into Latin, he used pyxis, a word associated with a box or small container. That translation choice helped shift the image in later European culture from a jar to a box.
The modern phrase is therefore not a literal reflection of the oldest Greek wording. It is the result of transmission through translation, especially as Renaissance scholars reintroduced Greek literature to a wider European readership. English and other languages later adopted the box image because it was vivid and easy to use metaphorically.
Today, “opening Pandora’s box” means beginning a process that releases many unexpected problems. The idiom preserves the myth’s basic structure while changing the original container and often simplifying the story’s complicated question about hope.