Who translated the Greek pithos in Pandora’s story into the Latin word pyxis?

Desiderius Erasmus translated the Greek pithos in Pandora’s story into the Latin word pyxis.

Erasmus was a Dutch Renaissance humanist whose Latin edition of Greek texts helped shape European literary culture. In handling the Pandora passage, he used pyxis, a Latin term for a box or small container, rather than preserving the original word pithos. This translation helped create the familiar English expression “Pandora’s box.”

The change matters because the earliest Greek story describes a large storage jar, not necessarily a compact box. Later artists and writers followed the more portable and visually simple image of a box with a lid, making that version dominant in modern culture.

Erasmus lived from about 1466 to 1536 and was a major scholar of classical and Christian texts. The translation was not the origin of the myth, but it strongly influenced how readers in western Europe imagined it. “Pandora’s box” is therefore partly a history of translation as well as a Greek myth.