In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman, created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hesiod related it, each deity cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum—is Anesidora. The Pandora myth is a kind of theodicy, addressing why there is evil in the world: she opened a jar (pithos; popularly "Pandora's box") and released the ills of humanity, while Hope remained inside.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Pandora" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Hesiod
Hesiod gives the earliest versions of the story, briefly in the Theogony and at greater length in Works and Days. After Prometheus stole fire for humankind, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold from earth the first woman—a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would afflict the race of men. In the Theogony she is not yet named Pandora.
Works and Days expands the gift-giving: Athena taught her weaving; Aphrodite shed grace and cruel longing upon her; Hermes gave her a deceitful nature and named her Pandora because all who dwell on Olympus had given her a gift. Zeus sent her as a bride to Epimetheus, who accepted her against Prometheus's warning.
In Works and Days she opens a jar and releases countless ills that wander among mortals; only Hope remains under the rim. Later mythographers such as Apollodorus and Hyginus make explicit her marriage to Epimetheus and their daughter Pyrrha, who survived the flood with Deucalion.
II.Pithos into "box"
Hesiod's pithos is a large storage jar, often half-buried, used for wine, oil, or grain—not a small box. The mistranslation as "box" is usually attributed to the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, who rendered pithos as Latin pyxis. The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured in popular speech ever since.
III.Difficulties of interpretation
Scholars note tensions in Hesiod's account: whether the jar held only evils or once held blessings; whether Hope's remaining inside is mercy or a further cruelty; and whether pre-Hesiodic tradition married Pandora to Prometheus rather than Epimetheus. M. L. West argued that confusion in the Hesiodic telling may reflect an older myth inverted or incompletely adapted.
Attic vase painters sometimes show a figure rising from the earth labeled Pandora, a chthonic image that sits uneasily beside Hesiod's crafted maiden and may preserve an independent ritual or dramatic tradition (including fragments of Sophocles' satyr play Pandora, or The Hammerers).
IV.Reception
From late antiquity onward Pandora was often paired with Eve as a type of the first woman whose transgression brought suffering into the world—a comparison that shaped Jewish, Christian, and Renaissance readings and visual art. Nineteenth-century drama (Goethe, Longfellow, and others) reused the myth with shifting marriages to Epimetheus or Prometheus, never settling on a single canonical meaning.
In modern idiom "opening Pandora's box" means unleashing unforeseen troubles that cannot easily be put back.