Hesiod first recorded the story of Pandora opening the container in his poem Works and Days.
Hesiod was an early Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days combines practical advice about farming and justice with mythic explanations of why human beings must work and suffer. Pandora’s creation and the opening of the jar appear in that moral and social framework.
Hesiod also discusses Pandora in Theogony, but the two poems do not tell exactly the same story. Theogony emphasizes the creation of woman as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus’s theft of fire. Works and Days supplies the fuller narrative of Pandora, including her gifts from the gods and the release of evils.
Homer is often associated with early Greek epic, but the surviving Homeric poems do not provide the Pandora jar story. Later writers, artists, and translators expanded and reshaped Hesiod’s account, helping create the familiar modern expression.