13,000 years ago when the Iron Age of agriculture, animal domestication, and
organized sedentary life started to take root in the Fertile Crescent. This agricul-
tural revolution was itself not as swift or total as it is often painted, even though
modern investigators tend to be as attracted as their ancient counterparts by the
concept of a sudden revolution in lifestyle. The process of grinding cereal grains
for human consumption goes back at least 12,000 years before organized farming
in the Fertile Crescent.^11 And the hunter-gatherer lifestyle still endures (whether or
not as a continuously persisting one), even if, according to Jared Diamond, it will
die out forever in our lifetimes.^12 That really will be the end of the Golden Age.
Still, even if agriculture and its discontents did not arrive overnight, the new agri-
culture-based life, once entrenched, observably shortened people ’s heights and life
expectancies with the introduction of new diseases and stresses.^13 A modern histo-
rian frames the dilemmas in a manner that an ancient one would have recognized:
Hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters... were not saved by the advent of
agriculture from the immemorial threat of extinction. On the contrary, they
enjoyed many millennia of “unending leisure and affluence.”... The big
question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be “How
did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised
society?” but “What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided
and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?”^14So much for modern science, and its own nostalgias. In the ancient tradition, we
see variations on the fundamental concept in our first extant source, Hesiod, who
gives us a range of ways of thinking about this falling-offfrom primal bliss into the
conditions of pain and toil that humans now inhabit. One complex set of stories
meshes the culpability of Prometheus, who alienated Zeus and divided humans
from gods with his trickery over the sacrifice at Mecone, together with the culpa-
bility of his brother Epimetheus; Epimetheus acted the part of Adam to the Eve of
Pandora, who was destined to let loose misery upon humankind by unsealing her
jar after she had been sent to deceive Epimetheus by the vengeful Zeus (Theog.
535 – 612; Op.42 – 105). In addition, Hesiod has an alternative aetiology for the
harshness of the current human condition, one with a far more potent afterlife, evi-
dently taken over from a Near Eastern source (Op.106 – 201).^15 In this story, con-
temporary humans are the fifth in a sequence of “Races,” at the head of which is a
Golden Race, whose members lived a life of ease and peace under Cronus, free
from hard work and pain (109 – 26). Next comes a Silver Race, whose members
From Bliss to Misery. 111