Hesiod is the Greek poet who first records the story later known as Pandora’s box.
The myth appears in two works attributed to Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days. Theogony gives a relatively compressed account of Pandora’s creation, while Works and Days provides the fuller narrative linking her arrival with the release of evils and the survival of hope. These poems are among the earliest surviving Greek literary sources for the story.
The phrase “Pandora’s box” is later than Hesiod and reflects a translation history. The original vessel is generally understood as a pithos, a large storage jar, rather than a small box. Erasmus’s Latin rendering helped popularize the box wording in European languages. Homer does not tell this particular story, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses offers different creation traditions rather than being the earliest source for Pandora.