The poet now describes the Ages, or various epochs in the civilization of the human race. The first is the Golden Age, a period of patriarchal simplicity, when Earth yielded her fruits spontaneously, and spring was eternal.
The GOLDEN AGE was first, when man, yet new,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew,
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforced by punishment, unawed by fear.
His words were simple and his soul sincere;
Needless were written laws where none oppressed;
The law of man was written on his breast.
No suppliant crowds before the judge appeared,
No court erected yet, nor cause was heard,
But all was safe, for conscience was their guard.
No walls were yet, nor fence, nor moat, nor mound;
Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet's angry sound;
Nor swords were forged; but, void of care and crime,
The soft creation slept away their time.
The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough,
And unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow;
The flowers, unsown, in fields and meadows reigned,
And western winds immortal spring maintained.
The next; or the Silver Age, was marked by the change of seasons, and the division and cultivation of lands.
Succeeding times a SILVER AGE behold,
Excelling brass, but more excelled by gold.
Then summer, autumn, winter did appear,
And spring was but a season of the year;
The sun his annual course obliquely made,
Good days contracted, and enlarged the bad.
Then air with sultry heats began to glow,
The wings of wind were clogged with ice and snow;
And shivering mortals, into houses driven,
Sought shelter from the inclemency of heaven.
Those houses then were caves or homely sheds,
With twining osiers fenced, and moss their beds.
Then ploughs for seed the fruitful furrows broke,
And oxen labored first beneath the yoke.
Then followed the Brazen Age, which was an epoch of war and violence.
To this came next in course the BRAZEN AGE;
A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage,
Not impious yet.
According to He'siod, the next age is the Heroic, in which the world began to aspire toward better things; but OVID omits this altogether, and gives, as the fourth and last, the Iron Age, also called the Plutonian Age, full of all sorts of hardships and wickedness. His description of it is as follows:
Hard steel succeeded then,
And stubborn as the metal were the men.
Truth, Modesty, and Shame the world forsook;
Fraud, Avarice, and Force their places took.
Then sails were spread to every wind that blew;
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new:
Trees rudely hollowed did the waves sustain,
Ere ships in triumph plough'd the watery plain.
Then landmarks limited to each his right;
For all before was common as the light.
Nor was the ground alone required to bear
Her annual income to the crooked share;
But greedy mortals, rummaging her store,
Digged from her entrails first the precious ore;
(Which next to hell the prudent gods had laid),
And that alluring ill to sight displayed:
Thus cursed steel, and more accursed gold,
Gave mischief birth, and made that mischief bold;
And double death did wretched man invade,
By steel assaulted, and by gold betrayed.
Now (brandished weapons glittering in their hands)
Mankind is broken loose from moral bands:
No rights of hospitality remain;
The guest by him who harbored him is slain;
The son-in-law pursues the father's life;
The wife her husband murders, he the wife;
The step-dame poison for the son prepares,
The son inquires into his father's years.
Faith flies, and Piety in exile mourns;
And Justice, here oppressed, to heaven returns.
The Scriptures assert that the wickedness of mankind was the cause of the Noachian flood, or deluge. So, also, we find that, in Grecian mythology, like causes led to the deluge of Deuca'lion. Therefore, before giving Ovid's account of this latter event, we give, from Hesiod, a curious account of