Erasmus introduced the Latin wording that helped turn Pandora’s jar into a “box.”
The Greek account by Hesiod uses the word pithos, meaning a large storage jar. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus translated the passage into Latin and used pyxis, a term for a box or small container. His translation helped establish the expression pyxis Pandorae, or “Pandora’s box,” in European literary culture.
The change was not simply a modern illustration error. It arose through the transmission of an ancient Greek text into Renaissance Latin, after which the box image spread through translations, literature and art. English inherited the now-standard phrase from this broader tradition.
Virgil, Cicero and Ovid were major Roman authors, but none is responsible for the famous jar-to-box translation. Erasmus’s work is especially influential because his Latin writings circulated widely among educated readers. The earliest Greek narrative remains the key evidence for the original container’s form.