Hesiod first called Pandora’s container a large storage jar in the surviving Greek literary tradition.
Hesiod describes the vessel with the Greek word “pithos,” a large jar used for storing commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. His account appears in Works and Days, composed in the archaic period, and is the earliest surviving literary version of the Pandora story.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” arose later through a translation history. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam rendered the Greek vessel as a Latin “pyxis,” meaning a box or small container, rather than preserving the original jar. That choice became influential in European languages and eventually fixed “Pandora’s box” as the standard expression.
The distinction matters because a pithos was not a small jewelry box. It was a substantial household storage vessel, making the scene materially different from many modern illustrations. The myth’s moral focus remains the same: human suffering enters the world when Pandora opens the sealed container, but the object itself was originally a jar.