Hesiod first recorded the surviving story of Pandora and her jar in ancient Greek literature.
The myth appears prominently in Hesiod’s Works and Days, an archaic Greek didactic poem generally dated to the seventh century BCE. Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, though the Works and Days provides the fuller account of her creation, marriage, and container.
Hesiod’s version connects Pandora to Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus’s actions. The poem is not a fairy tale in the modern sense; it discusses labor, justice, farming, human hardship, and the relationship between gods and mortals.
Homer is another major early Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the canonical Pandora story. Later writers, artists, translators, and philosophers expanded the myth and helped transform its jar into the familiar “box.”