Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the ancient Greek poem that gives the fullest surviving account of Pandora’s creation and the opening of her container. Hesiod was a Greek poet traditionally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE.
Works and Days is not solely a mythological narrative. It is also a didactic poem about farming, justice, hard work, seafaring, and the proper organization of life. The Pandora episode appears within a larger explanation of why human beings must labor and why suffering exists in the world.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, where the gods’ creation of the first woman is connected with Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus’s theft of fire. The two poems provide related but not identical details.
Homer is often associated with early Greek epic, but he is not the author of Works and Days. Sappho and Pindar lived later and wrote different kinds of poetry. Later artists and writers expanded the Pandora story, but Hesiod remains its earliest major literary source.