Which Greek work by Hesiod tells how Pandora’s jar released suffering into the world?

Hesiod’s Works and Days tells how Pandora’s jar released suffering into the world.

Works and Days is a didactic poem combining farming advice, moral instruction, disputes about justice, and myths explaining the human condition. Its Pandora episode appears in a discussion of why life became difficult for mortals after the age of easy abundance.

The poem’s account is especially important because it preserves the earliest extended version of the container story. Hesiod describes Zeus’s plan, Pandora’s divine gifts, her marriage to Epimetheus, and the release of evils from the jar. The work does not use the modern English phrase “Pandora’s box.”

Theogony, another poem attributed to Hesiod, also refers to Pandora and the punishment connected with Prometheus, but it is Works and Days that supplies the famous narrative sequence. The Iliad and Odyssey are Homeric epics and do not provide this specific Pandora episode.