Erasmus popularized the phrase “Pandora’s box” in Renaissance Europe through his Latin retelling of the myth.
The earliest surviving Greek account describes Pandora opening a pithos, a large storage jar. The familiar English expression developed after translators and writers rendered the Greek container as a box. Erasmus helped spread the wording through his influential Adagia, a collection of explanations and discussions of classical proverbs.
This change is one of the best-known transmission errors in classical mythology. A Greek term for a large jar was interpreted or translated in a way that led to the later image of a small box. Once the new form became established, “Pandora’s box” became a metaphor for an action that releases many unforeseen problems.
The expression now appears widely in journalism, literature, politics, and everyday speech. Its modern meaning depends more on the later proverb than on the exact object in Hesiod’s original story.