Hesiod's Five Ages of Man: Humanity Made and Unmade Five Times

Hesiod's account of humanity made and unmade five times: gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and the iron race that is us.

In Works and Days, written around 700 BCE, Hesiod says the gods made five races of humans in turn: gold, silver, bronze, the heroes, and the iron race, which is ours.

In Works and Days, a poem of farming advice and moral warning from around 700 BCE, Hesiod tells a history of humankind in five stages. The gods of Olympus first "made a golden race of mortal men" who lived in the time of Cronus. They "lived like gods without sorrow of heart," never grew old, and died as if falling asleep. After the earth covered them, they became kindly spirits who watch over mortals.

The next race, of silver, was far worse: its people stayed children at their mothers' side for a hundred years, then lived a short, foolish adulthood and would not honor the gods, so Zeus put them away. Zeus then made a race of bronze, sprung from ash trees, terrible and strong, whose armor, houses and tools were all bronze. They destroyed each other. The fourth race breaks the metal pattern: the heroes or demigods who fought at Thebes and Troy, some of whom now live on the Isles of the Blessed.

The fifth is our own. "For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night." Hesiod wishes he had died before it or been born after it, and predicts Zeus will destroy this race too when babies are born with gray hair.

Scholars compare the scheme with the four metals of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, with a Zoroastrian vision of metal ages, and with the Hindu yugas. The heroic race is often read as Hesiod fitting the epic past into an older four-metal myth. For readers of ancient visitor theories, it reads as humanity rebuilt in versions, each one replaced.