Hesiod wrote the earliest surviving Greek account of Pandora's Box. His poem Works and Days, composed around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, tells how Zeus punished humanity through Pandora after Prometheus stole fire.
Hesiod also retells Pandora's creation in his Theogony, though the two accounts differ in emphasis and detail. In Works and Days, the container is a large storage jar rather than a modern box, and the story explains why human life contains suffering and labor.
The expression “Pandora's box” became standard much later. Classical Greek texts describe a pithos, a large earthenware jar. The familiar box comes from later translation and artistic tradition, not from Hesiod's original wording. Hesiod's version is therefore the key source for the myth's earliest surviving literary form.