Silver Age

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.

Where the Golden Age is defined chiefly by what its people had, ease, plenty and long life without old age, the Silver Age is defined chiefly by what its people failed to do: honor the gods, restrain their own violence toward each other, and grow past a childishness that Hesiod stretches implausibly across a full century. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this shift as the first step in the poem's larger argument that each age after the first represents a further move away from divine favor, brought on by the race's own conduct rather than imposed on them for no reason, a pattern the Bronze Age intensifies and the Heroic Age, which follows it, interrupts.

The Silver Age has drawn far less independent literary attention than the Golden or Iron Ages that bracket the sequence, appearing mainly as a transitional stage in retellings of the whole five-age scheme rather than as a subject in its own right, and Hesiod's own account of it is correspondingly brief in comparison with the fuller treatment he gives the age he says he lives in himself, the Iron Age. When Ovid retold the sequence in Latin in the Metamorphoses, he preserved Hesiod's basic four-metal decline, Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron, but dropped the Heroic Age insertion entirely, folding its material back into a straightforward four-stage decline, which shows that even a close and admiring imitator did not treat Hesiod's five-part scheme as fixed or beyond alteration.