II
The Hesiodic poem known as the “Works and Days” consists of a number of independent pieces of didactic or narrative interest loosely strung together. In it, not far from the beginning, comes the story of the Five Ages of Men. As regards its subject-matter, the train of thought which unites this section to the passages which precede and follow it is hardly discoverable; in form it is quite disconnected.
In the beginning we are there told the gods of Olympos created a Golden race whose members lived like the gods, without care, sickness or decrepitude, and in enjoyment of rich possessions. After their death, which came upon them like sleep to tired men, they became, by the will of Zeus, Daimones and Guardians of mankind. They were followed by a Silver race, far inferior to the first, and unlike them in body as in mind. The men of this race had a long childhood, lasting a hundred years, followed by a short youth, during which their wantonness and pride in their dealings with each other and with the gods brought them much sorrow. Because they refused the honours due to the gods Zeus destroyed them and they are now Daimones of the Underworld, honoured [68] but inferior to the Daimones of the Golden Age. Zeus then created a third race, this time of Bronze—hard-hearted and of great strength; war was their delight, and being destroyed by their own hands they went down unhonoured to the House of Hades. Thereupon Zeus made a fourth race that was juster and better, the race of Heroes, who were called “Demigods”. They fought before Thebes and Troy and some of them died, while others Zeus sent to dwell at the ends of the world on the Islands of the Blest by the river Okeanos, where the Earth brings them her fruits three times in the year. “Would that I did not belong to the fifth Age; would that I had died earlier or been born hereafter,” says the poet, “since now is the Iron Age,” when toil and grief never leave men, when there is enmity of all against all and force conquers right, and Envy, evil-tongued, delighting in wickedness, fierce-eyed, is over everything. Now, Shame and the goddess of retribution, Nemesis, depart from men and go to the gods; every misfortune is left behind for man, and there is no defence against evil.
The author here lays before us the results of gloomy reflection upon the origin and growth of evil in the world of men. He sees the steps of mankind’s degeneration from the height of godlike happiness to the extremes of misery and wickedness. He is following popular conceptions. It is natural to every race of men to lay the scene of earthly perfection in the past, so long, at least, as man gets his information about that past not from distinct historical memory, but from the picturesque stories and beautiful dreams of the poets which encourage the natural tendency of fancy to retain only the more attractive features of the past in the memory. The folk-lore of many lands can tell of a Golden Age and how mankind gradually fell from that high estate; and it is not at all surprising if fanciful speculation starting from the same point and travelling along the same road has reached the same conclusion in the case of more than one people without the aid of any historical connexion. We have a number of expressions of the idea of man’s gradual degeneration through several Ages which present the most striking similarities among themselves and with the Hesiodic picture of the five Ages of Men. Even Homer is sometimes overcome by the mood; it lies, for instance, at the root of such idealizations of the past as are implied when in his description of the heroic life he thinks of “men as they now are” and “how few sons are equal to their fathers in virtue; worse, most of them; few, indeed, are the men who are better than their fathers” [69] (Od. ii, 276 f.). But the epic poet keeps himself and his fancy on the heights of the heroic Past; only occasionally, and in passing, his glance falls upon the commonplace level of real life. But the poet of the “Works and Days” has all his thoughts fixed upon the level plain of real and contemporary life; the glance which he occasionally casts upon the heights of the storied past is all the more bitter on that account.
What he has to say of the first condition of mankind and the gradual process of deterioration is given, not as an abstract exposition of what in the necessary course of things must have occurred, but rather as a traditional account of what had actually happened—in fact, as history.
In this light he himself must certainly have regarded it, though, apart from a few vague memories, no historical tradition is contained in what he says of the nature and deeds of the earlier generations of mankind. His story remains an imaginary picture. And for this reason the development, as he presents it, takes a logically defined and regulated course, based on the idea of a gradual deterioration. The uneventful happiness of the first race of men who know neither virtue nor vice is followed by a second race, which after a prolonged minority displays pride and contempt of the gods. In the third, or brazen age, active wickedness breaks out, with war and murder. The last age, at the beginning of which the poet himself seems to stand, marks the breakdown of all moral restraint. The fourth race of men, to which the heroes of the Theban and Trojan wars belong, is alone among all the others in not being named and ranked after a metal. It is an alien in the evolutionary process. The downward course is checked during the fourth age, and yet in the fifth it goes on again as if it had never been interrupted. It is not apparent why that course should have been interrupted. Most of the commentators have recognized in the story of the fourth age a fragment of different material, originally foreign to the poem of the Ages of Men and added deliberately by Hesiod to this poem, which he may have taken over in its essential features from older poets. But if we adopt this view we have to ask what can have tempted the poet to such serious disturbance and dislocation of the orderly succession of the original speculative poem. It will not be enough to say that the poet, brought up in the Homeric tradition, found it impossible to pass over, in a description of the earlier ages of men, the figures of the heroic poetry which, thanks to the power of song, had acquired in the imagination of the Greeks more reality than the plainest manifestations of actual life. Nor [70] is it likely that, having in his grim description of the Bronze race introduced a darker picture of the Heroic age, drawn from a point of view different from that of the courtly Epos, he wished to set by its side this bright vision of the same age as he saw it in his own mind. If the picture of the Bronze race does really refer to the Heroic age,[33] giving its reverse side, so to speak, Hesiod never seems to have noticed the fact. He must have had stronger grounds than these for the introduction of his narrative. He cannot have failed to perceive that he was breaking the continuity of moral deterioration by his introduction of the Heroic race. It follows that he must have had some aim, other than that of the description of the moral deterioration of men, which he imagined himself to be serving by the introduction of this new section. This other purpose will become plain if we inquire what it is that really interests the poet in the Heroic race. It is not their higher morality—that only interrupted the series of continually worsening generations. Nor would he in that case have dismissed the subject with a few words which barely suffice to connect this section with the theme of moral development. Further, it is not the fights and great deeds done at Thebes or Troy that interest him for he says nothing of their greatness, and at once declares that the cruel war and the dread fury of battle destroyed the Heroes. This, again, does not discriminate between the Heroes and the men of the Bronze age who also, being destroyed by their own deeds, had to go down to Hades. What distinguishes the Heroic age from the others is the way in which some of the Heroes depart from this life without dying. This is the point that interests the poet, and this it must have been that chiefly induced him to bring in here his account of the fourth race of men. He combines clearly enough with his main purpose of describing the advancing moral decline of man, a secondary aim—that of telling what happened after death to the representatives of each successive race. In introducing the Heroic race of men this secondary aim becomes the chief one, and justifies what would otherwise have been merely an intrusive episode. It is this aim, too, which gives the Hesiodic narrative its importance for our present inquiry.