Which ancient Greek poem by Hesiod first gives the complete story of Pandora’s jar?

Hesiod’s Works and Days gives the complete surviving story of Pandora’s jar.

The poem, composed in archaic Greece around the seventh century BCE, presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire. Hesiod describes the gods making and adorning Pandora before she enters the human world. The relevant account explains why suffering exists among humans and why the jar contains many harmful forces.

Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but that shorter passage does not provide the full narrative found in Works and Days. The familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” is therefore based on a later translation tradition rather than Hesiod’s original wording: Hesiod wrote about a pithos, or large storage jar.

Works and Days is not only a mythological poem. It also discusses farming, justice, labor, religious observance, and the dangers of arrogance, placing the Pandora story within a broader moral argument about human life.