Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving accounts of Pandora’s story.
Hesiod was a Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. His two major surviving poems, Works and Days and Theogony, preserve important versions of the Pandora tradition. The account in Works and Days links Pandora’s creation to Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus stole fire.
Theogony also mentions Pandora and the origin of women, though its treatment is briefer and differs in emphasis. Hesiod’s poems are therefore not identical versions of a single fixed tale. They belong to an oral and poetic culture in which myths could vary while retaining major characters and themes.
Homer is often associated with early Greek epic, but the surviving Homeric poems do not provide the foundational Pandora narrative found in Hesiod. Ovid, a Roman poet, wrote much later and is better known for Metamorphoses. The jar, the divine gifts, and the release of evils are chiefly known through Hesiod’s Greek works.