were much worse and not like the Golden Race in nature or mind (127 – 39); after
them comes a Bronze Race, unlike the Silver, terrible and powerful, devoted to
violence (140 – 55). At this point the pattern of degeneration is reversed as Hesiod
incorporates the Greek Race of Heroes into the paradigm: its members were bet-
ter, and more just, and now live a life untouched by sorrow in the far-distant
Islands of the Blessed, conforming to the pattern whereby the geographically and
chronologically removed may overlap (156 – 73). Finally comes the Race of Iron,
contemporary humans, “who do not cease from hard work and pain by day, or
from perishing by night” (oujdev potÆ h\marƒpauvontai kamavtou kai; oijzuvo", oujdev ti
nuvktwrƒfqeirovmenoi, 176 – 78).
A cognate myth of former happy simplicity and subsequent decline into the
complexities and miseries of contemporary life, or of modernity, is certainly per-
vasive among the Romans.^16 Indeed, it is clear that such a paradigm is more wide-
spread and more powerful among the Romans than among the Greeks, so much so
that the myth of a fall from a Golden Age to an Iron Age comes to be thegreat
Roman myth.^17 In origin, as we have seen, the myth is Near Eastern, mediated to
the Greeks by Hesiod; after him, and especially after the fifth century b.c.e.,
despite various noteworthy contributions we shall observe, the Greeks made sur-
prisingly little of it.^18 Cole, in his study of the concept of human progress in the
ancient world, describes a struggle in the fifth century b.c.e.between the myth of
the Golden Age and the myth of human progress, between, as he puts it, “Hesiodic
fantasy and Ionian science.” In this struggle Hesiodic fantasy lost, and Ionian sci-
ence won. Instead of believing that things were once much better and have since
become worse, the Greeks were persuaded by science that things were once much
worse and have since become better. Further, according to Cole, “these opinions
went almost unchallenged from the beginning of the fourth century until such time
as the Judaeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall began to colour ancient preconcep-
tions of prehistory.”^19 Cole ’s generalization, however true it may be for the
Greeks, by no means holds for the Romans, where we find a powerful tradition of
representing the past as fundamentally more free, desirable, and easy than the
present, and of representing the present as radically worse than the past, in a
decline from the state of nature.
Such a view is not by any means the preserve of the direct poetical heirs of
Hesiod. A crucial role of the ideology of the Ages of Gold and Iron under the
Principate of Augustus was precisely to play upon the idea of a fall in order to fur-
ther the atmosphere of on-going crisis that made Augustus seem indispensable. As
Wallace-Hadrill well puts it, “while for the Greeks the function of the Fall myth
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron