Erasmus translated Pandora’s Greek jar into a “box” in a famous Latin retelling.
The ancient Greek story describes a pithos, a large storage jar. In the sixteenth century, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus used the Latin term pyxis, meaning a box or small container, in a retelling of the myth. That choice helped establish the form that became familiar in European culture.
The change was not simply a modern misunderstanding of a picture. It arose through the movement of Greek mythology into Latin scholarship and Renaissance literary culture. Later writers, artists, and translators repeated the box version until it became the standard English expression.
Erasmus was a major Renaissance humanist known for editing and translating classical and Christian texts. He did not invent Pandora’s myth, and Hesiod’s earlier account remains the principal ancient source. His importance here is the influential Latin wording that shaped the myth’s later name.