Hesiod first records Pandora’s creation in the poem Theogony. The work is one of the earliest surviving Greek literary sources to describe the divine background of Pandora and the punishment of humanity.
Hesiod was an early Greek poet usually dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Theogony focuses on the origins and genealogy of the gods, while his Works and Days gives a fuller account of Pandora’s arrival among humans and the release of suffering from her vessel.
The myth is therefore not originally a single modern story called “Pandora’s box.” Its earliest surviving literary versions are embedded in Hesiod’s poems and use different emphases. Theogony stresses Zeus’s response to Prometheus, while Works and Days develops the moral and human consequences of Pandora’s arrival.