Hesiod's Myth of the five (or three or four) races

Abstract

Few passages in Greek literature are as familiar, and as perplexing, as the story of the various races of men in Hesiod'sWorks and Days. On the one hand, thismythseems perfectly to fulfill Italo Calvino's definition of a classic: somehow we seem always already to know it even when we come upon it for the very first time. For the conception of a golden age, when life was easier and men were better than now, has become so basic a motif of western culture that it is familiar even to the many who have never read or even heard of theWorks and Days; moreover, Hesiod seems at first glance to deploy such widespread notions as those of a succession of ages of world history and of a steady moral and physical deterioration from the beginning of human history to the present. But on the other hand, the specific literary form which this myth assumes in thetextin which it is embodied here seems strangely at odds with these familiar ideas. For Hesiod's text has a richness and complexity far in excess of what would be needed to communicate them, and in certain crucial respects seems to be at variance or even in contradiction with them. Instead of simply distinguishing between past and present, Hesiod apparently constructs a complicated scheme juxtaposing four metals in descending order of value, from gold through silver and bronze to iron; but he then goes on to confuse this pattern by inserting between the bronze and iron races a race of heroes who not only are not associated with any metal but also interrupt the steady decline by being better than their immediate predecessors. Without Hesiod, we probably would not even have this myth; yet his own version of it seems oddly defective.