Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” through a translation of Hesiod’s myth.
The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus used the Latin expression pyxis Pandorae, meaning Pandora’s box, in the sixteenth century. His wording helped shift the vessel in European retellings from the large Greek pithos described by Hesiod to a box-like container.
This is a translation and reception-history fact, not a claim that Erasmus invented Pandora. The story was already ancient, and Hesiod’s Works and Days had preserved the principal literary account many centuries earlier. Erasmus’s influence mattered because Latin remained a major language of European scholarship and education.
Ovid and Virgil were also major Latin writers, but neither is the figure chiefly associated with introducing the famous “Pandora’s box” wording. The distinction matters because popular culture often treats the phrase as if it came directly from the original Greek myth.