Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the ancient Greek poem that tells Pandora’s fuller story.
Works and Days combines practical advice about farming and seafaring with moral instruction, myths, and reflections on justice. Its account of Pandora explains the arrival of suffering and labor in the human world after Zeus’s conflict with Prometheus.
Hesiod is traditionally dated to the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. He is commonly studied alongside Homer as one of the earliest known Greek poets, although their works have different purposes and styles. Works and Days is more personal and instructional than Homer’s major heroic epics.
The poem also contains the Ages of Man, advice about agricultural timing, and warnings about injustice. Pandora’s story is therefore one episode within a much larger work about human conduct, work, hardship, and relations between mortals and gods.