Hesiod first used the name Pandora in the surviving Greek literary tradition.
Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. His works Theogony and Works and Days contain the earliest surviving literary accounts of Pandora and the jar associated with her.
In Works and Days, Pandora’s creation forms part of Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus brought fire to mortals. The poem presents Pandora as a divinely fashioned woman whose arrival changes the human condition. The Theogony also refers to her, though the accounts differ in emphasis and detail.
Homer does not provide the familiar Pandora story, and Ovid wrote much later in Latin. Sophocles was a dramatist rather than the source of the surviving foundational account. Because ancient myths circulated orally and in lost works, “first” here means the earliest surviving literary tradition, not necessarily the moment the story was invented.