Iron Age

The Iron Age is the fifth and last of Hesiod's ages and the only one he claims to inhabit himself, opening his description of it with the wish that he had either died before its start or been born later, a level of direct authorial complaint absent from anything he says about the four ages before it. In Evelyn-White's translation, Hesiod catalogues its failings at length: constant toil and grief by day, insidious cares by night, children who dishonor their parents, brother turned against brother, and a general collapse of hospitality and oath-keeping among people who now respect only the man of violence.

Hesiod frames the Iron Age not as a fixed condition but as a trajectory still worsening, telling Perses that Zeus will destroy this race too in time, once children are born already gray at the temples, an image of a humanity aging into decrepitude from birth that marks the furthest possible point from the Golden Age's people, who by contrast never grew old at all across their entire long lives. Hesiod frames his own complaint as a wish rather than a prophecy, wishing he had died earlier or been born later, which several commentators read as a rhetorical device meant to sharpen the moral urgency of the practical instruction that follows, rather than a literal claim that Hesiod expected the Iron Age to end within any foreseeable span of ordinary human time.

Hesiod closes the Iron Age passage, and with it the whole five ages sequence, by describing Aidos and Nemesis, the personified figures of shame and righteous indignation, wrapping themselves in white robes and departing the broad-pathed earth for Olympus, abandoning humanity to grief with no remedy left against evil, the single bleakest image in the entire myth. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this ending as the hinge on which the whole poem turns, since Works and Days does not stop at despair but moves immediately afterward into practical instruction on justice, work and the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, treating the Iron Age's hardship as the very condition that makes Hesiod's counsel to Perses necessary rather than optional.

The Iron Age has proven the most durable of Hesiod's ages in later usage, since unlike the Golden Age's nostalgic glow, "Iron Age" continues to name, in ordinary English as much as in Hesiod's Greek, any present felt to be one of hardship and moral decline relative to an imagined earlier and better time. The later Hellenistic poet Aratus, in his astronomical poem Phaenomena, took up the same image directly, describing Dike, or Justice, as the last of the immortals to abandon a degenerating humanity and identifying her afterward with the constellation Virgo, a direct continuation of Hesiod's Aidos and Nemesis leaving the earth for Olympus at the close of the Iron Age passage in Works and Days.