The ancient Greek poem that tells the Pandora myth involving the jar later called Pandora’s Box is Works and Days.
Hesiod’s Works and Days, usually dated to the seventh century BCE, presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire. Zeus orders her creation and sends her to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, carrying a sealed container.
The poem does not call the container a box. Its Greek word is pithos, meaning a large storage jar. Later retellings and translations transformed that jar into a box, creating the familiar English expression. Hesiod also describes Pandora as the first woman and connects her arrival with the release of troubles among humans.
Hesiod’s Theogony also mentions Pandora, but Works and Days gives the fuller narrative of her creation, arrival, and container. The two poems therefore should not be treated as identical versions of the story.