Erasmus’s Latin translation helped turn Pandora’s jar into a “box” in later Western tradition. The original Greek story describes a pithos, a large storage jar or container, rather than a small box.
The change is commonly linked to Erasmus’s early-sixteenth-century rendering of the story. A Latin word associated with a box or container entered the transmission of the myth, and later European retellings increasingly used the familiar image of a box. That wording eventually became fixed in English as “Pandora’s box.”
This translation history explains a major common mix-up: the popular expression is accurate as an idiom, but it does not reproduce the physical object in Hesiod’s Greek text. The jar was a normal ancient storage vessel, not necessarily a specially crafted magical box.
The phrase later acquired a broader meaning: opening Pandora’s box means starting a process that releases many unexpected troubles. That figurative sense is now more familiar than the details of the ancient vessel.