Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving full account of Pandora’s creation and jar in Works and Days. The poem, generally dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, combines agricultural advice, moral instruction, myth, and reflections on justice.
Hesiod presents Pandora as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus’s theft of fire. The gods fashion and adorn her, then send her to Epimetheus. Her opening of the sealed pithos explains why suffering affects human life, while the retained elpis gives the ending its enduring ambiguity.
Homer does not provide this complete Pandora episode in the surviving epics. Hesiod also mentions Pandora-related material in Theogony, but Works and Days supplies the detailed narrative familiar to modern readers. Later authors and translators expanded the story into the “Pandora’s box” tradition.