Works and Days links Pandora’s creation to Prometheus and humanity’s hardships.
Works and Days is a didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod. It combines advice about farming and household management with reflections on justice, labor, human decline, and relations between gods and mortals. The Pandora episode appears in this broader explanation of why human life is marked by toil and suffering.
The poem describes Prometheus’s theft of fire, Zeus’s retaliation, Pandora’s arrival, and the opening of the jar. These events form a connected mythic explanation rather than isolated anecdotes. The text is therefore the most important early literary source for the familiar Pandora story.
The Iliad and Odyssey are also foundational Greek poems, but neither is the primary source for Pandora’s creation and jar. Oedipus Rex is a later Greek tragedy by Sophocles and concerns a different mythic cycle entirely.