Works and Days gives the fullest surviving ancient account of Pandora and her container.
Hesiod’s Works and Days is a didactic poem traditionally dated to the seventh century BCE. It combines advice about farming and seasonal work with arguments about justice, human behavior, and the consequences of wrongdoing. The Pandora episode appears in that moral and economic setting, explaining why people face hardship and why labor is unavoidable.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days supplies the extended narrative: the gods fashion Pandora, she is sent to Epimetheus, and the container releases destructive forces while hope remains inside. The Iliad and Odyssey are Homeric epics and do not provide this canonical narrative. Later authors, translators, artists, and modern media expanded or altered the story, especially by turning the pithos into the familiar “box.”