Works and Days contains the best-known detailed account of Pandora opening the jar.
Hesiod’s poem is a mixture of practical advice, moral instruction, farming guidance, and myth. Its Pandora episode explains the origin of human suffering after Prometheus gives fire to mortals and Zeus arranges the creation of Pandora.
The poem says that Pandora opens a vessel containing harmful forces and that hope remains inside. Theogony, another work attributed to Hesiod, also refers to Pandora-related events, but Works and Days supplies the fuller narrative familiar to most readers.
The title is sometimes written as Works and Days or Works & Days in English. It should not be mistaken for Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which focus on heroic narratives and do not provide the main surviving Pandora episode.