Which Renaissance writer helped turn Pandora’s jar into a famous “box” in English tradition?

Desiderius Erasmus helped turn Pandora’s jar into a famous “box” in later European tradition.

In Hesiod’s Greek account, Pandora’s container is a pithos, a large storage jar used for grain, wine, or other goods. The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” reflects a later translation history rather than the wording of the earliest surviving myth.

The Renaissance humanist Erasmus is commonly associated with translating the Greek pithos as the Latin pyxis, meaning a box or small container. That rendering helped establish the object as a box in later retellings and translations. The English expression eventually became far more familiar than the original jar image.

This does not mean Erasmus invented Pandora’s story. Hesiod had written about Pandora many centuries earlier, in Works and Days and Theogony. The modern phrase is therefore a linguistic and cultural development: an ancient Greek jar was transformed by later translators into the “box” known worldwide.