Erasmus helped make “Pandora’s Box” the familiar phrase by translating the container as a box.
Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch Renaissance humanist and scholar. In a Latin edition of Hesiod, he used the word pyxis, meaning a box or small container, for the Greek pithos, a large storage jar. This translation helped establish the wording that later became standard in European languages.
The original Greek account therefore differs from the expression used in English today. The change was not necessarily intended to create a separate myth; it arose from a translator’s choice of Latin vocabulary and then spread through later retellings.
Erasmus is often remembered for works such as In Praise of Folly and for his Greek New Testament scholarship. His role in the Pandora phrase is a translation-history detail rather than a claim that he invented the underlying myth.