Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the earliest surviving literary source for Pandora’s jar story. Hesiod was an early Greek poet traditionally dated to around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE.
Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with farming, justice, labor, family conflict, and the proper organization of life. The Pandora episode appears within an explanation of why humans must endure toil and suffering after Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Hesiod also mentions Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days supplies the more developed account of the container and the escape of troubles. The poem calls the container a pithos, which is why scholars distinguish the ancient jar from the later “box” tradition.
Homer is sometimes paired with Hesiod as one of ancient Greece’s foundational poets, but Homer did not write the surviving Pandora jar narrative. That attribution is a frequent mix-up when readers broadly associate both poets with Greek mythology.