Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora’s creation.
The Greek poet Hesiod presents Pandora in two works, Theogony and Works and Days. Theogony gives a briefer account connected with Zeus’s punishment of humanity, while Works and Days provides the fuller narrative of Pandora, Epimetheus, and the vessel from which troubles escape.
Hesiod’s poems date to the archaic period of Greek literature, generally around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. They are among the most important surviving sources for Greek myth and early Greek ideas about the gods, labor, justice, and human origins.
Hesiod is often confused with Homer because both are foundational Greek poets and are traditionally placed near the beginning of Greek literary history. Homer is associated chiefly with the Iliad and Odyssey. The Pandora story, however, is especially tied to Hesiod’s didactic poetry, not to either Homeric epic.