Hesiod first recorded the Pandora myth in a surviving Greek work.
Hesiod was an archaic Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. The Pandora story appears most fully in his Works and Days, a didactic poem about farming, justice, work, and human hardship. Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony, though the Works and Days provides the better-known account of her creation and the jar.
The surviving poems do not present the modern phrase “Pandora’s box.” Hesiod describes a storage jar, and later translators and retellings transformed that object into a box. This distinction matters because the jar is part of the original textual evidence, while the box belongs to the later history of the story.
Homer is a tempting answer because he is another famous early Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not contain the canonical Pandora narrative. Hesiod’s authorship is therefore the standard answer in classical mythology references.