Erasmus is commonly credited with helping turn Pandora’s jar into a “box” in European retellings.
The ancient Greek story uses the word pithos, meaning a large storage jar. In the sixteenth century, the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus rendered the container with the Latin word pyxis in a Greek proverb collection. Pyxis can refer to a box or small container, and this translation helped establish the wording that became familiar in European languages.
The change was not an alteration made by Hesiod. It reflects the way classical myths were transmitted through translation, scholarship, and popular retelling. “Pandora’s box” is now so common that the original jar is often overlooked.
Erasmus was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, priest, and influential classical scholar. The precise history of the phrase involves earlier and later translators, so it is safest to say he helped popularize the box formulation rather than single-handedly inventing every use of it.