Which Hesiod poem contains the fullest surviving version of Pandora’s creation story?

Hesiod’s poem Works and Days contains the fullest surviving version of Pandora’s creation story.

Works and Days is a didactic Greek poem concerned with farming, justice, labor, and human hardship. Within its account of why suffering entered human life, Hesiod describes the creation of Pandora and the vessel associated with her.

Hesiod also mentions Pandora in the Theogony, but that passage is much shorter and focuses mainly on the consequences of Prometheus’s theft of fire. This difference is why Works and Days is the main literary source for the story as readers know it today.

The poem is generally dated to the seventh century BCE and is attributed to Hesiod, who is traditionally placed after Homer. It is not a modern narrative composed as a standalone myth; the Pandora episode is part of a broader moral and agricultural poem.