Erasmus translated Pandora’s Greek jar into a box in an influential Latin version. His 1508 Adagia helped popularize the expression “malo Pandorae pyxide,” commonly rendered as “Pandora’s box.”
Hesiod’s original vessel was a pithos, a large storage jar. Erasmus used the Latin word pyxis, which means a box or small container, and this wording strongly influenced later European retellings. The modern phrase therefore reflects Renaissance translation and proverb-making rather than the exact object in Hesiod’s poem.
Erasmus was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, scholar, and theologian best known for works including In Praise of Folly and his collections of classical proverbs. His interest in Greek and Latin texts helped transmit ancient stories to a broad educated readership.
The translation did not erase the older jar tradition, which remains visible in scholarship and art. It did, however, make “Pandora’s box” the dominant English expression and helped turn the myth into a general metaphor for a source of unforeseen problems.