Hesiod describes Zeus sending Pandora to Epimetheus in Works and Days. The poem is one of the two major surviving works traditionally attributed to Hesiod, alongside Theogony, and it contains the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora’s creation and the opened jar.
Works and Days is a didactic poem combining farming advice, moral instruction, myths, and reflections on justice. The Pandora episode appears within its explanation of why human life includes toil and suffering. Zeus’s gift is presented as part of the consequences that follow Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Theogony also mentions Pandora, but Works and Days supplies the fuller narrative of her fashioning, marriage to Epimetheus, and opening of the container. Homer is sometimes named by mistake because he is the best-known early Greek poet, yet the surviving Pandora narrative belongs specifically to Hesiod’s poetic tradition.