Hesiod’s Works and Days includes the Pandora story alongside the myth of Prometheus’s fire theft.
Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with labor, justice, farming, social conduct, and relations between humans and gods. Within that broader work, Hesiod explains why suffering and toil became part of human life through the linked stories of Prometheus, fire, Zeus, and Pandora.
The poem is one of the two major surviving works traditionally attributed to Hesiod, the other being Theogony. Works and Days is especially important for Pandora because it gives a detailed narrative of her creation, arrival at Epimetheus’s home, and opening of the container.
The Pandora episode also appears in Theogony, but the two works are not identical in focus or detail. The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” is a later formulation; Hesiod’s account concerns a storage jar. Modern translations may use different terms and wording while preserving the same central episode.