Hesiod first recorded the story of Pandora’s jar in a surviving literary work.
Hesiod, an early Greek poet usually dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, gives the earliest surviving literary versions of the Pandora story. His account appears especially fully in Works and Days, where Pandora is connected to the arrival of suffering, disease, and hard labor among humans.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony. These references show that the story belonged to an early Greek mythological tradition, although the surviving texts do not necessarily preserve its first-ever telling. Earlier oral versions may have existed but are not directly available to historians.
Homer is another foundational Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the familiar Pandora narrative. Sophocles was a later tragedian, and Herodotus was a historian. Their prominence in Greek literature can make them plausible alternatives, but neither is the author of the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora.