Hesiod’s Works and Days gives the fullest ancient account of Pandora’s jar.
Hesiod was a Greek poet generally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Works and Days is a didactic poem concerned with justice, labor, agriculture, and the difficult conditions of human life. The Pandora episode appears within that broader discussion of why humans experience hardship.
Hesiod also mentions related material in Theogony, a poem about the origins and generations of the gods. Theogony contains the creation of woman as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus, but Works and Days provides the more recognizable narrative involving Pandora, the container, and the troubles released from it.
Homer is another major early Greek poet, but the Pandora jar story is not primarily known from the Homeric epics. Ovid later retells many Greek myths in Latin literature, yet he is not the source of the canonical ancient account. Hesiod is the key name for this specific story.