The Four Ages
First to be born was the Golden Age. Of its own free will, without laws or enforcement, it did what was right and trust prevailed. Punishment held no terrors; no threatening edicts were published in tablets of bronze; secure with none to defend them, the crowd never pleaded or cowered in fear in front of their stern-faced judges. No pine tree had yet been felled from its home on the mountains and come down into the flowing waves for journeys to lands afar; mortals were careful and never forsook the shores of their homeland. No cities were yet ringed round with deep, precipitous earthworks; long straight trumpets and curved bronze horns never summoned to battle; swords were not carried nor helmets worn; no need for armies, but nations were free to practise the gentle arts of peace.
The earth was equally free and at rest, untouched by the hoe, unscathed by the ploughshare, supplying all needs from its natural resources. Content to enjoy the food that required no painful producing, men simply gathered arbutus fruit and mountain strawberries, cornel cherries and blackberries plucked from the prickly bramble, acorns too which they found at the foot of the spreading oak tree. Spring was the only season. Flowers which had never been planted were kissed into life by the warming breath of the gentle zephyrs; and soon the earth, untilled by the plough, was yielding her fruits, and without renewal the fields grew white with the swelling corn blades. Rivers of milk and rivers of nectar flowed in abundance, and yellow honey, distilled like dew from the leaves of the ilex.
When Saturn was cast into murky Tártarus, Jupiter seized the throne of the universe. Now there followed the age of silver, meaner than gold but higher in value than tawny bronze. Gentle spring was no longer allowed to continue unbroken; the king of the gods divided the year into four new seasons: summer, changeable autumn, winter and only a short spring. The sky for the first time burned and glowed with a dry white heat, and the blasts of the wild winds froze the rain into hanging icicles. People now took shelter in houses; their homes hitherto had been caves, dense thickets or brushwood fastened together with bark. For the first time also the corn was sown in long ploughed furrows, and oxen groaned beneath the weight of the heavy yoke.
A third age followed the Silver Age, the bronze generation, crueller by nature, more ready to take up menacing weapons, but still not vile to the core.
The final age was of iron; the floodgates opened and all the forces of evil invaded a breed of inferior mettle. Loyalty, truth and conscience went into exile, their throne usurped by guile and deception, treacherous plots, brute force and a criminal lust for possession. Sailors spread their sails to the winds they had tempted so rarely before, and the keels of pine that had formerly stood stock still on the mountain slopes presumptuously bobbed in the alien ocean. The land which had been as common to all as the air or the sunlight was now marked out with the boundary lines of the wary surveyor. The affluent earth was not only pressed for the crops and the food that it owed; men also found their way to its very bowels, and the wealth which the god had hidden away in the home of the ghosts by the Styx was mined and dug out, as a further incitement to wickedness. Now dangerous iron, and gold – more dangerous even than iron – had emerged. Grim War appeared, who uses both in his battles, and brandished his clashing weapons in hands bespattered with slaughter. Men throve on their thefts: no guest was safe from his host, no father secure with his daughter’s husband; love between brothers was found but seldom. Men and their wives would long for each other’s demise; wicked stepmothers brewed their potions of deadly wolfsbane; sons would cast their fathers’ horoscopes prematurely. All duty to gods and to men lay vanquished; and Justice the Maiden was last of the heavenly throng to abandon the blood-drenched earth.
