Which Renaissance scholar helped turn Pandora’s storage jar into a “box” in Latin retellings?

Erasmus of Rotterdam helped turn Pandora’s storage jar into a “box” in Latin retellings.

Hesiod used the Greek word pithos, normally referring to a large storage jar or container. In a sixteenth-century Latin rendering, the humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam used pyxis, a word associated with a box or small container. That vocabulary helped establish the familiar expression “Pandora’s box” in later European languages.

The change was not simply a modern translator’s casual mistake. Greek terms could carry different meanings in Latin, and Renaissance readers encountered the myth through classical texts, translations, and commentary. Once “box” became conventional, it shaped nearly every later popular retelling.

Ancient vase paintings and literary descriptions are therefore better evidence for a jar than for a hinged wooden box. The common English phrase remains historically influential even though it does not precisely reproduce Hesiod’s vessel.