Hesiod describes Pandora as the first woman in the story of humanity’s troubles.
Hesiod, an early Greek poet, presents the Pandora narrative in Works and Days. In that account, Zeus orders the gods to create Pandora after Prometheus gives fire to humans. She is described as a divinely fashioned woman whose arrival helps explain why suffering and hardship exist in the human world.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony, though the fullest narrative details appear in Works and Days. The two poems are among the earliest surviving Greek literary sources for the myth and are central to its later interpretation.
Homer is another major early Greek poet, but the familiar Pandora story is not primarily recorded in the Homeric epics. Pindar and Sappho belong to later periods and are associated with different surviving bodies of poetry. Identifying Hesiod matters because later versions often combine his details with Roman, medieval, and modern adaptations.