Hesiod wrote the fullest surviving account of Pandora’s story in Works and Days.
Hesiod was an early Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days is a didactic poem combining advice about farming, justice, labor, and proper conduct with myths explaining the human condition. Its account of Pandora appears while Hesiod explains why people must work and why life contains suffering.
Hesiod also tells the story in the Theogony, but that earlier genealogical poem gives less narrative detail. In Works and Days, Pandora’s creation, marriage to Epimetheus, and opening of the jar are connected to Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Homer is often placed in the same broad period, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the standard Pandora narrative. Sophocles and Aristophanes were later Athenian dramatists, not the source of Hesiod’s account.