Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” by translating the jar as a box.
In Hesiod’s Greek, Pandora’s container is a pithos, generally understood as a large storage jar. The Latin word pyxis means a box or small container. Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus used the Latin form pyxis in a 1508 collection of proverbs, helping set the tradition that later English readers would know as “Pandora’s box.”
The shift is a famous example of how translation can reshape a myth. The ancient story’s container was practical and sizable, not necessarily a small hinged box. Later art, literature, and popular speech adopted the box because it made the image compact and memorable.
Erasmus did not invent Pandora or the story of the evils and Hope. His influence lies in transmitting a changed description of the container through Renaissance Latin culture and subsequent European languages.