Hesiod’s main account of Pandora and the opened container appears in Works and Days.
Works and Days is an ancient Greek didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod, who probably lived around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. The poem combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining why human life includes labor and suffering.
Pandora appears in the section describing Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus gave people fire. The gods create Pandora, and she becomes associated with the release of destructive troubles into the human world.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative. A frequent mistake is to identify Theogony as the sole source. Theogony is important for Hesiod’s mythology, yet the familiar story of Pandora opening the container is primarily associated with Works and Days.