Hesiod first recorded the Pandora myth in the poem Works and Days. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE.
Works and Days combines practical advice about farming and justice with myths and moral stories. Pandora appears in the poem as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus’s theft of fire. The poem explains the origin of suffering and labor through the arrival of the divinely created woman and the opening of her container.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, another early Greek poem about the origins and generations of the gods. The two works differ in emphasis, and Works and Days provides the fuller narrative associated with the container and the release of troubles.
Homer is often named as Greece’s other great early poet, but the Pandora story is specifically associated with Hesiod’s surviving works. Later authors, artists, and translators reshaped details of the myth.