Hesiod first recorded the complete surviving Greek myth of Pandora in his poem Works and Days. The poem, composed around the 7th century BCE, gives the earliest detailed literary account of Pandora’s creation, marriage, and container.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative. In that poem, Zeus orders the gods to create a woman as part of his punishment of humanity after Prometheus steals fire. The gods give Pandora various gifts before she is sent to Epimetheus.
The familiar expression “Pandora’s box” comes from later translation and retelling. Hesiod’s Greek text describes a large storage vessel, commonly identified as a pithos, rather than a small box. The English phrase became standard because of Renaissance translation choices.
Hesiod was not writing modern-style history. His poems are mythological and didactic works, but they are the earliest surviving literary sources for the Pandora story. Earlier oral traditions may have existed, yet no earlier complete written account survives.