Works and Days gives the fullest surviving account of Pandora’s creation and opening of the vessel.
The poem is attributed to Hesiod, an early Greek poet traditionally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Its Pandora narrative appears in a section explaining why human life contains toil and suffering, linking the story to Zeus’s conflict with Prometheus.
Hesiod’s Theogony mentions Pandora more briefly in connection with the creation of women and the consequences of Prometheus’s theft. The Iliad and Odyssey are different epic poems and do not provide the same detailed Pandora episode.
The text calls the object a pithos, a large storage jar. The familiar “box” comes from later translation history, especially the influence of the Latin term pyxis and subsequent European retellings.