Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box.”
The original Greek myth describes a pithos, or large jar. In a Latin rendering associated with the Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus, the container was translated with the word pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That choice helped establish the form that became familiar in European languages.
Erasmus was a Dutch humanist, priest, and prolific writer who lived from 1466 to 1536. The wording became influential even though it changed the physical image in the ancient account. This is why references to Pandora often show a compact box, while classical scholarship points to a much larger storage jar. The translation history also explains why the modern expression should be understood as a conventional idiom rather than a precise description of the vessel in Hesiod’s Greek text.