Hesiod first recorded the surviving literary versions of Pandora’s myth. The story appears in his poems Works and Days and Theogony, composed in archaic Greece.
Works and Days gives the fuller account: Zeus has Pandora fashioned and sends her to Epimetheus as a punishment connected with Prometheus’s theft of fire. The poem describes a large storage vessel, later commonly called a box, from which destructive troubles spread among humans.
Theogony presents Pandora more briefly and emphasizes her creation as part of Zeus’s plan. Hesiod’s accounts are therefore the earliest surviving written sources for the myth, although oral versions may have existed earlier.
A common mistake is to attribute the story to Homer. No surviving Homeric poem contains the Pandora narrative in the form known from Hesiod.