Reading the Myth

Jenny Strauss Clay's study Hesiod's Cosmos situates the Golden Age within the wider argument of Works and Days, a poem addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses over a disputed inheritance, arguing that the five ages sequence functions less as literal history than as a moral diagnosis of how far the present, toil-filled world has fallen from an imagined original condition, preparing the audience for the poem's practical instruction on justice and hard work that follows. On this reading the Golden Age matters most for what it is not: a world without the need for exactly the labor and legal argument that occupy the rest of the poem.

The Golden Age proved to be the single most influential of Hesiod's five ages in later Western literature, providing the template later Greek and Roman writers, including Ovid in the Metamorphoses, used for their own accounts of a lost original harmony, and it remains the source of the everyday phrase "a golden age" for any period regarded as a high point later ages fall short of, independent of any of Hesiod's other four ages retaining comparable currency. Roman writers carried the association further than Ovid alone: Cronus was identified with the Roman god Saturn, and the Golden Age became the Saturnia regna, the reign of Saturn, commemorated every December in the festival of Saturnalia, whose temporary suspension of ordinary social rank between master and slave was explicitly understood by Roman authors as a brief, ritual return to the equality Hesiod's first age was believed to have enjoyed.