Works and Days gives the fullest surviving version of Pandora’s creation and the opened vessel.
The poem is attributed to Hesiod and combines moral teaching, farming advice, reflections on justice, and myths about the human condition. Its Pandora episode follows Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus steals fire. Zeus has a woman fashioned and furnished by the gods, and her opening of the container introduces suffering into the human world.
Hesiod’s Theogony also refers to Pandora, but its treatment is much shorter. The Theogony focuses primarily on divine genealogy and the succession of the gods, whereas Works and Days uses Pandora’s story to explain human hardship and reinforce its broader lessons about labor, restraint, and justice.
The Iliad and Odyssey are Homeric epics and are often selected by readers looking for an ancient Greek source, but neither is the principal surviving source for Pandora’s myth. Plato’s Republic is a philosophical dialogue from a later period and likewise does not contain Hesiod’s complete Pandora narrative.