Hesiod’s Works and Days says Pandora was created as a punishment connected with Prometheus’s theft of fire. The poem presents Pandora’s arrival as part of Zeus’s response after Prometheus deceives the gods and gives fire to humans.
Works and Days is a didactic Greek poem concerned with justice, farming, labor, and proper conduct. Its Pandora episode explains how suffering entered human life, making it a mythic origin story rather than a separate adventure narrative. The poem also describes the gods contributing gifts to Pandora before she is sent to Epimetheus.
Hesiod’s Theogony is another major early work, but it does not contain the full Pandora narrative found in Works and Days. That distinction is often tested because both poems come from the same poet and discuss gods and cosmic order. The Pandora story’s complete punishment framework belongs specifically to Works and Days.