Hesiod is credited with the earliest surviving written account of Pandora’s creation.
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet who probably lived around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. His poems Works and Days and Theogony preserve the earliest surviving literary versions of the Pandora story. The accounts differ in emphasis, but together they establish the major elements of Pandora’s creation and her connection with Zeus’s punishment of humanity.
Hesiod’s narrative describes Pandora as a woman made by the gods and sent to Epimetheus. It also explains the release of evils from her container and the place of hope in the human condition. Later writers and artists expanded, altered, or simplified these details.
Homer is another foundational Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the earliest Pandora creation narrative. Herodotus wrote historical prose much later, and Sophocles was a tragedian rather than the source of the original surviving account.