Hesiod’s Theogony gives the earliest surviving literary account of Pandora’s creation.
The poem presents a cosmic genealogy of the Greek gods, beginning with primordial beings and tracing the rise of Zeus. Near its end, Hesiod describes how Zeus ordered the creation of a beautiful woman after Prometheus deceived him by keeping the best part of a sacrificial animal for humans.
The Theogony gives only a brief account of Pandora. Hesiod’s longer version appears in Works and Days, where the container, the escaping evils, and the fate of humanity receive more attention. The two poems therefore overlap but are not identical retellings.
A common mistake is to call Theogony a later retelling of the familiar “box” story. It is actually an early Greek source, although the word used for Pandora’s container was a large storage jar rather than a small box. The title Theogony means “birth of the gods,” reflecting the poem’s wider subject.