Hesiod first describes Pandora and her jar in a surviving literary work.
The key account appears in Works and Days, a didactic poem generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Hesiod also discusses Pandora in the Theogony, although the Works and Days passage provides the fuller narrative connecting her creation, Prometheus’s theft of fire, and the release of human troubles.
Hesiod is one of the earliest known Greek poets, traditionally placed alongside Homer. Unlike the epic focus of the Homeric poems, his surviving works often address labor, justice, divine genealogy, and the conditions of human life. His Pandora story is therefore part of a broader explanation of why suffering and work exist in the mortal world.
Later writers and artists transformed the episode, and many modern versions simplify or alter it. Still, Hesiod is the essential early literary source. Homer does not provide the familiar Pandora-and-jar narrative in the surviving Homeric poems.