Hesiod wrote Works and Days, a major ancient source for Pandora’s myth. The poem is generally dated to the archaic period of Greek literature and combines practical advice about farming and justice with mythic explanations of human hardship.
Its Pandora passage appears in a discussion of why people must work and why suffering exists. The poem connects the creation of woman and the release of evils with Zeus’s punishment of humanity after Prometheus obtained fire. Hesiod also describes the successive Ages of Man, including the decline from a better earlier age.
Hesiod is often studied alongside Homer as one of the foundational poets of ancient Greece, although their works have different purposes and styles. The Pandora story also appears in another Hesiodic poem, Theogony, but Works and Days provides the fuller narrative details most commonly retold today.