Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” through a sixteenth-century Latin retelling.
The oldest Greek account describes Pandora opening a pithos, or large jar. In his Adagia, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus used the Latin term pyxis, meaning box, when presenting the story. That choice helped establish the wording that later became familiar across European languages.
The change was not simply a modern advertising invention. Renaissance scholars frequently transmitted Greek myths through Latin texts, translations, and collections of classical sayings. Once the box image became established, artists, writers, and educators repeated it, while the technical detail about the original jar became less prominent.
Erasmus should not be confused with Ovid, who wrote major Latin mythological poetry but is not responsible for the standard “Pandora’s box” wording. The story itself predates Erasmus by many centuries and is chiefly associated with Hesiod’s Works and Days.