Erasmus helped popularize the word “box” instead of “jar” in the Pandora story.
In Hesiod’s Greek account, Pandora opens a pithos, a substantial storage jar used for storing commodities. The familiar expression “Pandora’s box” arose through later translation history rather than from the original Greek wording.
The Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus used the Latin term pyxis, meaning box or casket, in a 1508 Latin rendering of the story. That wording helped establish the object as a box in later European tradition, even though jar is closer to Hesiod’s description.
This is why modern summaries can be misleading when they present a small hinged box as an ancient Greek detail. The change is a translation and reception-history development, not a change made by Hesiod himself.