Who translated Hesiod’s jar into a “box,” helping create the phrase “Pandora’s box”?

Desiderius Erasmus helped create the phrase “Pandora’s box” by translating Hesiod’s container as a box rather than a jar. His Latin rendering changed the form in which the myth became widely known in Europe.

Hesiod’s original Greek word is pithos, which generally refers to a large storage jar or container. Erasmus used the Latin word pyxis, meaning a box or small container, in a sixteenth-century translation connected with his Adagia. That choice established the familiar expression in later Western languages.

The common phrase therefore differs from the earliest surviving literary account. In Hesiod, Pandora opens a container and releases troubles; the “box” is a later translation tradition rather than the exact object named in the Greek poem.

This is why “Pandora’s box” can be historically misleading while remaining completely standard in modern English. The expression now describes an action that unleashes many unforeseen problems.