Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving accounts of Pandora’s myth.
The story appears primarily in two works associated with him: Theogony and Works and Days. Theogony briefly describes Pandora as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity, while Works and Days gives a fuller narrative involving her creation, marriage to Epimetheus, and the opening of the container.
Hesiod lived in archaic Greece, generally dated to around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. His poems are among the earliest surviving Greek literary works and are fundamental sources for Greek genealogies, divine origins, and myths about the relationship between gods and humans.
Pandora’s story is sometimes casually attributed to Homer because Homer is the best-known early Greek poet. However, the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the main account of Pandora’s jar. Hesiod’s version also differs from later artistic and literary retellings, particularly in calling the container a jar rather than a box.