Hesiod wrote the Pandora story in his ancient Greek poem Theogony. The poem presents a mythological genealogy of the gods and includes the creation of woman as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Theogony is one of Hesiod’s two major surviving poems, alongside Works and Days. Its account of Pandora is shorter than the later, more detailed narrative in Works and Days. Reading both poems helps explain why references to Pandora can vary in emphasis: one focuses on divine genealogy and punishment, while the other develops the story’s moral and human consequences.
Hesiod lived in the early archaic period of Greek literature, though the precise dates of his life are uncertain. He is traditionally grouped with Homer as one of the foundational poets of ancient Greece. The Pandora episode is therefore not a later Roman invention; it belongs to some of the earliest surviving Greek literary tradition.