Hesiod describes Pandora as bringing the evils of the world into human life. His poems Works and Days and Theogony preserve the earliest surviving literary accounts of Pandora and the vessel associated with her.
In Works and Days, Pandora’s arrival follows Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus gives people fire. The opened vessel releases harmful conditions into the world, while one final element remains inside. The story explains, in mythic form, why human life includes suffering and hardship.
Homer is another foundational Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the complete Pandora narrative associated with the vessel. Pindar and Sappho belong to later Greek literary traditions and are not the source of the standard account. Later writers, artists, and translators reshaped the story, but Hesiod remains its key early literary authority.