Works and Days is the ancient Greek poem that tells the Pandora story alongside an account of humanity’s declining ages. It is attributed to Hesiod and combines mythology with advice about farming, justice, work, and daily life.
The poem presents Pandora within a story about Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus’s theft of fire. It then includes the famous sequence of human ages, commonly called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron ages.
Works and Days is not a narrative epic in the same form as Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Much of it addresses the poet’s brother Perses and discusses how people should behave, when to work, and why justice matters.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller connected account of her creation, the divine gifts, and the opening of the container. That difference explains why the poem is so frequently cited in studies of the myth.