Hesiod wrote Works and Days, the ancient poem containing Pandora’s jar story.
Works and Days is an archaic Greek poem traditionally attributed to Hesiod, who probably lived around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. It combines advice about farming, moral instruction, legal conflict, and stories explaining the hardships of human life. The Pandora episode appears in this wider discussion of why suffering and labor exist.
Hesiod also tells a related version of Pandora’s creation in Theogony. The two poems are important because they preserve some of the earliest surviving literary forms of the myth. Their details differ in emphasis, so later summaries that blend them can obscure what each poem actually says.
Homer is another major early Greek poet, but the Pandora jar episode is associated with Hesiod rather than with the Iliad or Odyssey. Works and Days is also the source most directly connected with the vessel that later became known in English as Pandora’s box.