Erasmus first used the phrase “Pandora’s box” in a widely influential Latin text.
The earliest surviving Greek account by Hesiod describes a storage jar, not a box. In the early sixteenth century, the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus translated or adapted the story in his Latin work Adagia, published in 1508, and used pyxis, a word meaning box or small container. This helped establish the wording that became familiar in European languages.
The change was not simply a modern misunderstanding of a picture. It resulted from a translation choice that spread through educated European writing and later popular culture. Artists, poets, and writers then made the box the standard visual form of the myth.
The phrase now has a meaning beyond Greek mythology: opening Pandora’s box means starting a process that releases many unforeseen troubles. Scholars often distinguish the ancient jar from the later box while recognizing that the modern expression has a long and influential history.