Golden Age

Hesiod places the Golden Age in Works and Days at the opening of his account of the five ages, describing a race of mortals whom the gods of Olympus made first, while Cronus still ruled heaven. They lived, in his words, as though they were gods themselves, free from toil, misery and old age, their limbs never failing, feasting on what the fertile earth produced of itself without need for plowing. Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation, the standard English edition long used for this passage, renders their end as gentle rather than violent: they were overcome by sleep, as though death itself were merely rest, and passed away without the pain or fear later ages would know.

Hesiod adds that this was not simple annihilation. By the will of Zeus, the Golden Age race became daimones, spirits who walk the earth cloaked in mist, watching over the judgments and misdeeds of the mortals who came after them and giving wealth in return for right conduct, a guardianship role that ties the very first age directly to the moral concerns of the poem's later, much harsher present. Hesiod calls each of the five ages a genos, a Greek word closer to "race" or "stock" than to a single human generation, which is part of why the Golden Age can be described as though it lasted for a long span of ordinary human lifetimes rather than a single cohort born and dying together, distinguishing Hesiod's scheme from a literal genealogy of the kind found elsewhere in early Greek poetry.

Jenny Strauss Clay's study Hesiod's Cosmos situates the Golden Age within the wider argument of Works and Days, a poem addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses over a disputed inheritance, arguing that the five ages sequence functions less as literal history than as a moral diagnosis of how far the present, toil-filled world has fallen from an imagined original condition, preparing the audience for the poem's practical instruction on justice and hard work that follows. On this reading the Golden Age matters most for what it is not: a world without the need for exactly the labor and legal argument that occupy the rest of the poem.

The Golden Age proved to be the single most influential of Hesiod's five ages in later Western literature, providing the template later Greek and Roman writers, including Ovid in the Metamorphoses, used for their own accounts of a lost original harmony, and it remains the source of the everyday phrase "a golden age" for any period regarded as a high point later ages fall short of, independent of any of Hesiod's other four ages retaining comparable currency. Roman writers carried the association further than Ovid alone: Cronus was identified with the Roman god Saturn, and the Golden Age became the Saturnia regna, the reign of Saturn, commemorated every December in the festival of Saturnalia, whose temporary suspension of ordinary social rank between master and slave was explicitly understood by Roman authors as a brief, ritual return to the equality Hesiod's first age was believed to have enjoyed.