Erasmus first translated Pandora’s Greek jar as a box in a famous sixteenth-century version. The Greek source uses pithos, a large storage jar, but Erasmus rendered the vessel with the Latin word pyxis, meaning a box or small container.
Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch humanist whose Latin scholarship helped spread classical stories across Renaissance Europe. His translation choice influenced the later English expression “Pandora’s box,” even though the original Greek image was a substantial jar. The change is a classic example of how translation can reshape a myth’s most recognizable object.
The distinction matters because a pithos was used for storing commodities such as grain or oil, whereas a box suggests a smaller object. Modern illustrations usually show a decorated box, but that image is not the vessel described by Hesiod. The myth’s central sequence—Pandora opens it, evils escape, and Hope remains—comes from the older Greek tradition.