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.