Works and Days gives the fuller surviving narrative of Pandora opening the container.
The poem is attributed to Hesiod and combines farming advice, moral teaching, myth, and reflections on justice. Its Pandora episode links the arrival of women, the release of hardships, and the consequences of Prometheus’s conflict with Zeus.
Hesiod’s Theogony also mentions Pandora, but its treatment is briefer. Theogony focuses primarily on divine genealogy and the organization of the gods, whereas Works and Days develops the human consequences of Zeus’s punishment in greater detail.
The Iliad and The Odyssey are major Greek poems, but they are not the surviving literary sources for the standard Pandora-container narrative. Later writers and artists made the story more elaborate, often smoothing ambiguities in the ancient text.