Why Hesiod Needed a Fifth Race

Jenny Strauss Clay treats the Heroic Age as the clearest sign that Hesiod's five ages are a moral argument rather than a strict metallurgical allegory, since a purely metal-based decline from gold through silver and bronze has no room for an improvement partway down, yet Hesiod inserts one anyway to make room for the heroes of epic poetry, whom his audience could not plausibly place in the brutish, nameless Bronze Age immediately before them. The insertion costs the scheme its metallic symmetry in exchange for narrative and cultural coherence with the wider poetic tradition Hesiod was writing within.

The Heroic Age also sets up the poem's harshest rhetorical move: Hesiod goes on to say that he wishes he had either died before the fifth age, the Iron Age he actually lives in, or been born after it, a wish that only carries force because the Heroic Age has just shown its audience that the world can, in principle, still improve rather than only decline, even if Hesiod holds no such hope for his own era. The Catalogue of Women, an early epic poem transmitted under Hesiod's name though its authorship is debated among scholars, lists many of the same heroes and their mortal or divine mothers, and the two works are often read together as evidence of a wider body of genealogical heroic poetry that the brief Heroic Age passage in Works and Days draws on and compresses rather than invents from nothing.