Which ancient Greek text first calls Pandora’s container a pithos, or large storage jar?

Hesiod’s Works and Days is the ancient Greek text that calls Pandora’s container a pithos, or large storage jar. The poem uses the word in its account of Pandora and the evils released into the human world.

A pithos was a large ceramic vessel used in the ancient Greek world for storing commodities such as grain, oil, and wine. It was not the small, hinged box imagined by many modern illustrations. The familiar expression “Pandora’s box” developed later, partly because a translation or interpretation shifted the vessel from a jar into a box.

Works and Days is generally dated to the seventh century BCE and is attributed to Hesiod. It is a didactic poem concerned with farming, justice, labor, and the human condition. The Pandora episode appears in that wider discussion rather than as an isolated fairy tale.

The distinction between pithos and box matters because it changes the physical image of the myth. In the earliest surviving detailed account, Pandora opens a substantial storage jar, not a modern container with a hinged lid.