Hesiod first tells the Pandora story in the surviving epic Theogony. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Theogony presents a genealogy and history of the gods, and it includes an account of woman’s creation as a consequence of Prometheus’s conflict with Zeus.
Hesiod also gives a fuller version in Works and Days, where Pandora opens the storage jar and releases human troubles. The two poems are the key early literary sources for the myth, although their wording and emphasis differ. Theogony focuses more on the divine construction and the consequences of the gift, while Works and Days develops the story in a moral and didactic context.
Homer is often named as a possible answer because he is the other major early Greek poet, but the surviving Homeric epics do not provide the Pandora story in the form associated with the jar. Hesiod is therefore the canonical answer for the earliest surviving literary account.