Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s Box” instead of “Pandora’s Jar.”
In Hesiod’s Greek account, Pandora opens a pithos, a large jar. During the Renaissance, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated or adapted the passage into Latin using a word associated with a box or small container, often identified as pyxis. That change helped establish “Pandora’s Box” in European usage.
The modern idiom consequently reflects a translation history rather than the exact object named in the earliest surviving Greek version. The older jar detail remains important in classical scholarship, while “box” is now the standard phrase in English and many other languages.
Erasmus was a major Renaissance scholar whose work circulated widely across Europe. He did not invent Pandora or the underlying myth; Hesiod had written about Pandora in ancient Greece centuries earlier. His importance here is that his Latin wording helped redirect the image of the container in later Western culture.