Which Renaissance humanist helped turn Pandora’s Greek jar into the familiar “box” in later retellings?

Desiderius Erasmus helped turn Pandora’s Greek jar into the familiar “box” in later retellings.

Hesiod’s Greek word for Pandora’s container is pithos, meaning a large storage jar. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus rendered the vessel using the Latin word pyxis in his collection of classical proverbs. Pyxis referred to a box or small container, and the altered image gradually became influential in European versions of the myth.

The change is a famous example of how translation can reshape mythology. Readers encountered a box rather than the large jar described in the Greek source, and “Pandora’s box” eventually became the dominant English expression.

Erasmus did not invent Pandora or the story of the evils escaping. Hesiod had recorded the myth many centuries earlier. Erasmus’s importance lies in the later transmission and wording of the container. The result is a phrase that is culturally universal even though it does not exactly reproduce the original Greek object.