Hesiod is the ancient Greek poet credited with first recording Pandora’s story.
Pandora appears in two surviving works associated with Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days. In Theogony, she is connected with the creation of the first woman and Zeus’s punishment of humanity. Works and Days gives the fuller account of her creation, her gifts from the gods, and the opening of the container that released human troubles.
Hesiod lived in the early archaic period, generally dated to around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. His poems are among the earliest surviving Greek literary works, making his version the foundational written source for Pandora.
Homer is often named alongside Hesiod as a major early Greek poet, but Pandora is not principally a Homeric character. Ovid retold many Greek myths in Latin centuries later, while Sophocles was a dramatist rather than the first recorder of this story.