Theogony first introduces Pandora as a punishment connected with Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Hesiod’s Theogony, composed in archaic Greece, briefly describes Zeus ordering the creation of a woman as a punishment for Prometheus’s deception and theft of fire. The passage is shorter than the later and fuller narrative in Works and Days, but it establishes the connection between Pandora, divine retaliation, and humanity’s suffering.
Works and Days expands the episode with more details about Pandora’s construction, the gifts of the gods, Epimetheus’s acceptance, and the container. Because the two poems differ in emphasis, readers sometimes assume that only Works and Days contains the Pandora myth. Theogony is earlier in the sequence of surviving literary evidence for the story’s presentation, though the precise dating of Hesiod’s poems remains debated.
Theogony is not a general Greek Bible or a complete mythological encyclopedia. It is chiefly a genealogy and account of the origins of the gods, so Pandora appears within a broader discussion of Zeus, Prometheus, and the consequences imposed on mortals.