Hesiod places the Golden Age in Works and Days at the opening of his account of the five ages, describing a race of mortals whom the gods of Olympus made first, while Cronus still ruled heaven. They lived, in his words, as though they were gods themselves, free from toil, misery and old age, their limbs never failing, feasting on what the fertile earth produced of itself without need for plowing. Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation, the standard English edition long used for this passage, renders their end as gentle rather than violent: they were overcome by sleep, as though death itself were merely rest, and passed away without the pain or fear later ages would know.
Hesiod adds that this was not simple annihilation. By the will of Zeus, the Golden Age race became daimones, spirits who walk the earth cloaked in mist, watching over the judgments and misdeeds of the mortals who came after them and giving wealth in return for right conduct, a guardianship role that ties the very first age directly to the moral concerns of the poem's later, much harsher present. Hesiod calls each of the five ages a genos, a Greek word closer to "race" or "stock" than to a single human generation, which is part of why the Golden Age can be described as though it lasted for a long span of ordinary human lifetimes rather than a single cohort born and dying together, distinguishing Hesiod's scheme from a literal genealogy of the kind found elsewhere in early Greek poetry.