Which Dutch humanist’s Latin translation helped turn Pandora’s Greek jar into the familiar “box”?

Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Latin translation helped turn Pandora’s Greek jar into the familiar “box.”

Hesiod’s ancient Greek account uses the word pithos, meaning a large storage jar or vessel. In the myth, Pandora opens this container and releases troubles into the human world, while hope remains inside.

The “box” wording became influential through Renaissance Latin scholarship. Erasmus used pyxis, a word for a small box or chest, in a collection of proverbs published in 1508. That wording helped establish the version now common in English and many other languages.

The change is a translation history, not a different ancient Greek ending. Modern retellings often call the object a box, but classical references generally describe a jar. The story is recorded most fully in Hesiod’s Works and Days, written in ancient Greece.