Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the earliest major literary source for Pandora’s story.
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet traditionally dated to around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with farming, justice, work, and the consequences of human behavior. Its account of Pandora appears in a broader explanation of why suffering and labor exist in the human world.
Hesiod also tells a related version in the Theogony, although the two poems emphasize different aspects of the story. He does not use the modern phrase “Pandora’s box”; his Works and Days describes a pithos, or large jar. Because Hesiod’s poems are among the oldest surviving Greek literary works, they are central evidence for reconstructing the early form of the myth.