The Ages of Man

The Ages of Man is the mythic scheme in which history is a decline through a sequence of ages named for metals of decreasing value. Its classic Western statement is Hesiod's Works and Days, of about 700 BCE, which gives five: a golden race living without toil under Kronos; a silver race, prolonged in childhood and impious; a bronze race, violent and destroyed by its own warring; a race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy; and the iron race, Hesiod's own, in which men labour and grieve by day and are worn down by night, and which he predicts will decline until children are born grey at the temples and might is the only right.

The heroic age is the anomaly, since it is better than the bronze age preceding it and breaks the metallic sequence entirely. It is generally read as Hesiod's accommodation of the epic tradition to a scheme he inherited rather than invented, and its awkward presence is among the reasons for thinking the scheme older than the poem.

Comparable schemes appear elsewhere. Daniel 2 recounts Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with clay, interpreted as a succession of kingdoms, a four-kingdom scheme with an extremely long afterlife in Jewish and Christian historical thinking, and one repeatedly reapplied to whichever empire was current. Indian cosmology has the four yugas, Krita or Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, declining in righteousness and in duration in the ratio 4:3:2:1, with the present Kali Yuga the worst and, on the standard reckoning, still with a very long time to run. Zoroastrian material preserves a comparable four-age scheme of gold, silver, steel and iron.

The scheme's persistent function is to explain why the present is worse than the past, and thereby to authorise an appeal to an earlier standard. It supports two opposite responses. It supports quietism, since decline is built into the structure and one can only endure it, an inference frequently drawn in Kali Yuga rhetoric. And it supports reform, since a golden age supplies a measure against which the present can be judged and to which it might be returned.

Whether the Greek, Iranian and Indian versions are independent or share an inheritance is debated. The parallels are close enough that Indo-European transmission has often been proposed, and the underlying sentiment is close enough to universal that independent origin is equally defensible.

Ovid's Metamorphoses, composed in the years around 8 CE, is the version of the ages-of-man scheme that reached the largest later audience, compressing Hesiod's five ages to four metals and fixing the golden-silver-bronze-iron sequence that European literature inherited; where Hesiod's poem was known directly to relatively few, Ovid's was a schoolroom text across the medieval and early modern West, and it is chiefly through Ovid that the scheme survives in ordinary cultural memory as "the golden age" and its declining successors.

The Enlightenment idea of progress was constructed, in significant part, as the myth's deliberate inversion. Where the ages-of-man scheme places perfection in the unrecoverable past and treats the present as the worst point yet, thinkers including Turgot and Condorcet in eighteenth-century France proposed instead that history is a cumulative advance in knowledge and human capacity, running the arrow the other way, and this newer story rather than the older one now supplies the default framework for most modern political and scientific self-description.

Neither myth has displaced the other in practice, and both continue to organise rhetoric that presents itself as simple observation. Appeals to a lost golden age recur across very different eras and causes, from Roman writers idealising the early Republic to modern political movements promising a return to a better prior condition, and the appeal works the same way each time: it does not need to identify exactly when the golden age occurred, only to assert that decline from it can be measured and, implicitly, reversed.