Alexander Pope published The Dunciad, which contains an early English reference to “Pandora’s box.” The mock-heroic poem first appeared in 1728 and attacks literary dullness through elaborate parody modeled partly on classical epic.
The phrase’s presence in Pope’s work reflects the changing history of Pandora’s container. The ancient Greek story used a pithos, but Latin and later European treatments increasingly represented it as a box. By the eighteenth century, the boxed version was becoming familiar to English readers.
Pope’s poem is not a retelling of Hesiod’s myth. Instead, its allusion uses Pandora’s container as a cultural shorthand for the release of troublesome consequences. This is one reason the modern idiom can be used far beyond mythology, literature, or ancient Greece.