Works and Days by Hesiod includes the detailed account of Pandora opening her jar.
The poem combines practical advice about farming and seafaring with reflections on justice, labor, morality, and the human condition. The Pandora episode appears as part of Hesiod’s explanation for why people must work and why life contains suffering that was not present in an earlier age.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative: the gods create and adorn Pandora, Zeus sends her to Epimetheus, and she opens the storage vessel containing destructive forces. The poem’s context is therefore important; the myth is not an isolated fairy tale but part of a larger meditation on human hardship and responsibility.
Works and Days is generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Its account is the principal ancient source behind the modern expression “Pandora’s box,” even though Hesiod’s original container was a pithos, or jar.