Hesiod first records the story of Pandora opening the container that released human troubles. His account survives in the eighth-century BCE poem Works and Days.
Hesiod presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment for Prometheus’s theft of fire. Zeus orders the gods to make a woman, and the gods provide her with different gifts. She is sent to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus, who accepts her despite Prometheus’s warning.
The myth is also mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative of the container and its contents. Homer does not tell the Pandora story in the surviving Homeric poems. Later Greek, Roman, and modern writers adapted the episode, while the familiar English expression “Pandora’s box” developed from later translation and retelling.