Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” through a sixteenth-century Latin translation. In translating the Greek container described by Hesiod as a pithos, he used the Latin term pyxis, which means a box or small container.
Erasmus was a major Renaissance humanist whose editions and translations circulated widely across Europe. His wording influenced later retellings, helping replace the ancient image of a large storage jar with the box familiar in modern English.
The change was not simply a new version of the myth invented by Erasmus. It was a translation choice that became influential through publication and reuse. Ovid and Virgil wrote about many Greek myths, but they are not the figures chiefly associated with this jar-to-box wording shift.