Hesiod first names Pandora in the surviving literary tradition.
Pandora appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days, generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, and also in the Theogony. These poems provide the earliest surviving literary accounts of her creation and her connection with the release of evils into human life.
The story is sometimes casually attributed to Homer because Homer is another major early Greek poet. However, the surviving Homeric epics do not contain the familiar Pandora narrative. Hesiod’s poems are therefore the key primary literary sources for the myth.
The two Hesiodic versions are not identical in emphasis. Works and Days gives the fuller account of the jar and Pandora’s role in human suffering, while the Theogony presents her in a more compressed genealogical and mythic context. Later authors and artists expanded the story, but Hesiod remains the earliest surviving literary authority.