Ash Trees and the Meaning of the Metal

The detail that the Bronze Age race sprang from ash trees, rather than being made directly by the gods as the Silver Age was, has drawn sustained scholarly comment, since ash wood was the standard material for spear shafts in Greek warfare, making the race's origin itself an image of weaponry, appropriate to a people Hesiod says cared for nothing but war. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this detail, alongside the race's bronze houses and bronze tools, as building an image of a humanity defined entirely by its weapons and materials rather than by any of the moral or intellectual qualities Hesiod uses to characterize the ages around it.

Unlike the Golden and Silver metals, which retained positive associations in later Greek and Roman literature as emblems of value and rank, bronze in Hesiod's scheme carries no such prestige, standing instead for a specifically martial and self-destructive character, a association distinct from the everyday value bronze held as a practical Bronze Age metal in the archaeological record of the societies Hesiod himself was distantly recalling. The same logic explains why the following Iron Age carries no comparable prestige of its own: iron was the ordinary, unglamorous working metal of Hesiod's own day, ubiquitous rather than precious, which let him use it to name an age defined by unrelieved daily toil rather than by any of the destructive violence bronze had already been used to characterize one age earlier.