Hesiod first recorded Pandora’s creation in the poem Works and Days.
Works and Days is an archaic Greek didactic poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod, probably composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. It combines farming advice, moral instruction, legal concerns, and mythic explanations of human hardship. Pandora appears in its discussion of why labor and suffering entered mortal life.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but the two poems do not present exactly the same amount of narrative detail. Works and Days gives the fuller account of her creation, the jar, and the troubles released from it.
Hesiod’s Pandora is not simply a villain in the modern sense. The poem’s broader argument concerns the consequences of Zeus’s order, human dependence on labor, and the difficult conditions of mortal existence. Later authors and artists greatly expanded the story’s imagery.