Hesiod is traditionally credited as the author of the Pandora story in Works and Days.
Works and Days is an ancient Greek didactic poem usually dated to the seventh century BC. It combines advice about farming and justice with myths explaining why human life includes toil, sickness, and hardship. Pandora appears in this broader account as part of Zeus’s response to Prometheus’s theft of fire.
Hesiod also refers to Pandora in the Theogony, although the account there is shorter and differs in emphasis. This is why the Pandora myth is associated with Hesiod rather than with Homer, whose surviving epics do not contain the familiar jar-opening episode.
Ancient authorship was not documented in the modern sense, so “Hesiod” means the traditional attribution. Scholars discuss the composition and transmission of Works and Days, but the poem remains the key early Greek literary source for Pandora.