The Heroic Age is Hesiod's clearest departure from the strict metal-decline logic that otherwise governs the five ages, since it introduces a fourth race, more just and noble than the Bronze Age before it, without assigning that race a metal of its own. In Evelyn-White's translation, Hesiod identifies this race directly with the demigod heroes celebrated in earlier epic poetry, the fighters at seven-gated Thebes and at Troy over Helen, tying his own moralizing sequence explicitly to the heroic material of the Homeric tradition his audience already knew.
Hesiod divides the Heroic Age's end in two: some of its heroes died in battle at Thebes and Troy, swallowed by war exactly as the Bronze Age race had been, while others Zeus removed from ordinary mortal fate entirely, settling them at the ends of the earth, on the Isles of the Blessed, where the grain-giving earth bears fruit three times a year, under the renewed rule of Cronus, the very god who had presided over the vanished Golden Age. M.L. West's scholarly commentary on Works and Days, a standard reference for the poem's textual and interpretive problems, treats the Heroic Age passage as very likely an authentic part of Hesiod's own composition rather than a later interpolation, against some earlier nineteenth century scholars who had proposed cutting it as an inconsistency, on the grounds that the passage's vocabulary and concerns are continuous with the rest of the poem even where its logic strains the metal sequence.