Hesiod first described Pandora as the first woman created by the gods.
Hesiod presents Pandora in two surviving poems, Theogony and Works and Days. In these works, Zeus orders her creation after Prometheus’s theft of fire. The gods contribute to her appearance and abilities, and she is sent to Epimetheus as part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity.
The phrase “first woman” belongs to Hesiod’s mythic framework and does not mean that every ancient Greek tradition told the same origin story. Pandora’s narrative is especially important because it links the arrival of women, marriage, labor, and human suffering in Hesiod’s explanation of the world.
Hesiod is generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Homer is another major early Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the Pandora creation narrative that made Hesiod central to this myth.