Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” in Renaissance Europe.
The earliest Greek version describes a pithos, or large storage jar. During the transmission of the story into Latin and later European languages, the vessel was transformed in some contexts into a box. The Latin humanist Desiderius Erasmus was important in spreading the expression through his influential writings and collections of classical references.
Erasmus lived from 1466 to 1536 and was one of the leading scholars of the Northern Renaissance. His work helped make Greek and Roman learning accessible to a broad European readership, although the change from jar to box was part of a longer translation and reception history rather than the work of one person alone.
Ovid and Virgil were earlier Roman authors, but neither is the key answer to this specific question. Pandora’s myth was not central to the surviving works of either poet in the way it was to Hesiod’s poems.