Hesiod wrote that Pandora’s vessel held humanity’s illnesses and troubles. His Works and Days gives the fullest surviving early account of Pandora and explains how suffering became widespread among human beings.
Hesiod presents the vessel as containing destructive forces that had previously been kept away from humanity. Once Pandora opens it, the evils scatter through the world. The poem names diseases among the troubles, emphasizing the myth’s explanation for why human life includes pain, hardship, and sickness.
Homer is a common wrong answer because he is the other major early Greek epic poet, but the surviving Homeric poems do not provide the detailed Pandora episode found in Hesiod. Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, although Works and Days supplies the more developed narrative.
The story belongs to Greek mythological poetry rather than to a single canonical religious scripture. Later authors, artists, and translators expanded and altered its imagery.