Hesiod describes the Silver Age as a race the Olympian gods made after the Golden Age had passed, inferior to it in every way, in body and in mind alike. In Evelyn-White's translation, a child of this race was raised at its mother's side for a hundred years, remaining foolish and childlike the entire span, and only lived a brief further span as an adult once fully grown, a span marked by suffering brought on through sheer foolishness, since its people could not restrain themselves from crime against one another and refused to offer the gods the sacrifice that was their due.
Zeus, angered that this race would not honor the gods as was proper, put them away, ending the Silver Age as decisively as the Golden Age had ended gently. Hesiod nonetheless grants the Silver Age a kind of continuing honor after death, calling its people blessed mortals of the underworld, second in dignity only to the spirits of the Golden Age, a distinction that separates the Silver Age from the harsher fate Hesiod assigns to the Bronze Age immediately after it. The choice of silver as the second metal follows the same rough value hierarchy silver held against gold in ordinary Greek economic life, a hierarchy the poem repeats without needing to explain it to its original audience, since silver coinage and silver as a store of value were both already familiar well below gold and above the bronze and iron named in the two ages that follow.