Hesiod is the Greek poet who first describes Pandora’s creation and arrival among humans in surviving literature.
The two principal accounts appear in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, poems generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days provides the fuller narrative of Pandora’s formation, her gifts, and the opening of the jar, while the Theogony presents a shorter version connected to Zeus’s punishment of humanity.
Hesiod is one of the earliest Greek poets whose works survive substantially, alongside Homer. His poems are especially important for Greek mythology because they organize divine genealogies and explain relationships among gods, Titans, and humans.
The phrase “first describes” refers to surviving literary evidence, not necessarily the invention of the myth. Oral stories may have circulated before Hesiod wrote them down, but no earlier surviving Greek narrative gives the same account. Later authors and artists significantly reshaped Pandora’s image.