Bronze Age

Hesiod describes the Bronze Age as a third race, wholly unlike the Silver Age it replaced, one that Zeus made from ash trees, terrible and strong, given over entirely to the violent deeds of war. In Evelyn-White's translation their houses, their tools and their weapons alike were of bronze, since iron was not yet worked, and their bodies were as hard and unyielding as the metal that surrounded them. Hesiod stresses that this was a race no one could love, dreadful and powerful, delighting in groans and violence and eating no bread, a detail scholars have read as marking them as barely civilized, closer to beasts than to the fully human races before or after them.

Their end came by their own hands rather than by divine punishment as with the Silver Age: they destroyed one another in constant warfare and descended nameless to the dank house of Hades, leaving behind no distinguishing fame despite, or perhaps because of, their fearsome strength, a fate Hesiod contrasts pointedly with the honored afterlives he grants both the Golden and Silver races before them. Modern archaeology also uses the term Bronze Age, for the several centuries in which bronze was the dominant metal for tools and weapons across the Aegean and the Near East, and the coincidence of naming has occasionally caused confusion; classical scholars are careful to note that Hesiod's mythic Bronze Age race is a moral category in a five-part poetic scheme, not a claim about a historical period, even though the two uses of the word arose from a shared sense that bronze once mattered more than it did in Hesiod's own iron-tool present.

The detail that the Bronze Age race sprang from ash trees, rather than being made directly by the gods as the Silver Age was, has drawn sustained scholarly comment, since ash wood was the standard material for spear shafts in Greek warfare, making the race's origin itself an image of weaponry, appropriate to a people Hesiod says cared for nothing but war. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this detail, alongside the race's bronze houses and bronze tools, as building an image of a humanity defined entirely by its weapons and materials rather than by any of the moral or intellectual qualities Hesiod uses to characterize the ages around it.

Unlike the Golden and Silver metals, which retained positive associations in later Greek and Roman literature as emblems of value and rank, bronze in Hesiod's scheme carries no such prestige, standing instead for a specifically martial and self-destructive character, a association distinct from the everyday value bronze held as a practical Bronze Age metal in the archaeological record of the societies Hesiod himself was distantly recalling. The same logic explains why the following Iron Age carries no comparable prestige of its own: iron was the ordinary, unglamorous working metal of Hesiod's own day, ubiquitous rather than precious, which let him use it to name an age defined by unrelieved daily toil rather than by any of the destructive violence bronze had already been used to characterize one age earlier.