Hesiod first recorded the story now known as Pandora’s Box in his poem Works and Days.
Hesiod was an early Greek poet traditionally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with labor, justice, farming, social behavior, and the difficult condition of human life. Its account of Pandora appears within that broader discussion rather than as an isolated fairy tale.
Hesiod also wrote Theogony, a major genealogy of the Greek gods. Pandora is connected to both works, but Works and Days provides the detailed narrative involving Prometheus, fire, Epimetheus, the sealed vessel, and the escape of troubles.
The expression “Pandora’s Box” is later than Hesiod and does not exactly reproduce his wording. His Greek text refers to a pithos, a large storage jar. Later translation and artistic traditions changed that vessel into a box, but Hesiod remains the earliest known literary source for the core story.