Erasmus helped popularize the phrase “Pandora’s box” in the sixteenth century.
Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, priest, theologian, and classical scholar. In his Adagia, a major collection of classical proverbs and expressions, he rendered the vessel in Pandora’s story as a box rather than preserving Hesiod’s original pithos jar.
The wording spread through European literary culture and eventually became the standard English expression. This is why modern speakers usually imagine a box even though the earliest Greek account describes a large storage container.
Erasmus did not invent Pandora’s myth. Hesiod’s Works and Days is the foundational ancient source, written roughly two millennia before Erasmus. Erasmus’s importance lies in the later transmission and reshaping of the image, not in creating the story itself.