Heroic Age

The Heroic Age is Hesiod's clearest departure from the strict metal-decline logic that otherwise governs the five ages, since it introduces a fourth race, more just and noble than the Bronze Age before it, without assigning that race a metal of its own. In Evelyn-White's translation, Hesiod identifies this race directly with the demigod heroes celebrated in earlier epic poetry, the fighters at seven-gated Thebes and at Troy over Helen, tying his own moralizing sequence explicitly to the heroic material of the Homeric tradition his audience already knew.

Hesiod divides the Heroic Age's end in two: some of its heroes died in battle at Thebes and Troy, swallowed by war exactly as the Bronze Age race had been, while others Zeus removed from ordinary mortal fate entirely, settling them at the ends of the earth, on the Isles of the Blessed, where the grain-giving earth bears fruit three times a year, under the renewed rule of Cronus, the very god who had presided over the vanished Golden Age. M.L. West's scholarly commentary on Works and Days, a standard reference for the poem's textual and interpretive problems, treats the Heroic Age passage as very likely an authentic part of Hesiod's own composition rather than a later interpolation, against some earlier nineteenth century scholars who had proposed cutting it as an inconsistency, on the grounds that the passage's vocabulary and concerns are continuous with the rest of the poem even where its logic strains the metal sequence.

Jenny Strauss Clay treats the Heroic Age as the clearest sign that Hesiod's five ages are a moral argument rather than a strict metallurgical allegory, since a purely metal-based decline from gold through silver and bronze has no room for an improvement partway down, yet Hesiod inserts one anyway to make room for the heroes of epic poetry, whom his audience could not plausibly place in the brutish, nameless Bronze Age immediately before them. The insertion costs the scheme its metallic symmetry in exchange for narrative and cultural coherence with the wider poetic tradition Hesiod was writing within.

The Heroic Age also sets up the poem's harshest rhetorical move: Hesiod goes on to say that he wishes he had either died before the fifth age, the Iron Age he actually lives in, or been born after it, a wish that only carries force because the Heroic Age has just shown its audience that the world can, in principle, still improve rather than only decline, even if Hesiod holds no such hope for his own era. The Catalogue of Women, an early epic poem transmitted under Hesiod's name though its authorship is debated among scholars, lists many of the same heroes and their mortal or divine mothers, and the two works are often read together as evidence of a wider body of genealogical heroic poetry that the brief Heroic Age passage in Works and Days draws on and compresses rather than invents from nothing.