Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hesiod tells Perses how the gods made successive races of mortal men. First was the Golden race under Cronus: they lived without toil or grief, feasted, and died as if overcome by sleep; the earth gave food of its own accord. After death they became kindly daimones who walk the earth as guardians of mortal justice. Second came the Silver race, far worse: children stayed by their mothers a hundred years, then lived briefly in folly, wronging one another and refusing to sacrifice to the gods. Zeus hid them away in anger; they became blessed spirits of the underworld, second in honor. Third was the Bronze race, sprung from ash trees (Melian), terrible and strong, loving the works of Ares, not bread. Bronze were their arms, houses, and tools; they destroyed themselves by their own hands and went nameless to chill Hades, leaving no fame. Fourth—and not of metal—Zeus made the godlike race of heroes, the demigods of the generation before our own: they fought at Thebes over Oedipus’s flocks and at Troy for fair-haired Helen. Some died in war; others Zeus settled at the ends of the earth, on the Islands of the Blessed, ruled by Cronus, where the earth bears honey-sweet fruit three times a year. Fifth is the Iron race—Hesiod’s own—in which men never cease from toil and sorrow by day, and ruin by night. Zeus will destroy this race too when infants are born with grey temples; father and child will not agree, guest-friend and host will fail, and Shame (Aidos) and Nemesis will leave the earth for Olympus, abandoning mortals to grief without remedy. The myth thus frames the Iron present between heroic glory and a threatened end, urging justice (dike) while the guardians of the Golden age still watch.