Hesiod closes the Iron Age passage, and with it the whole five ages sequence, by describing Aidos and Nemesis, the personified figures of shame and righteous indignation, wrapping themselves in white robes and departing the broad-pathed earth for Olympus, abandoning humanity to grief with no remedy left against evil, the single bleakest image in the entire myth. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this ending as the hinge on which the whole poem turns, since Works and Days does not stop at despair but moves immediately afterward into practical instruction on justice, work and the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, treating the Iron Age's hardship as the very condition that makes Hesiod's counsel to Perses necessary rather than optional.
The Iron Age has proven the most durable of Hesiod's ages in later usage, since unlike the Golden Age's nostalgic glow, "Iron Age" continues to name, in ordinary English as much as in Hesiod's Greek, any present felt to be one of hardship and moral decline relative to an imagined earlier and better time. The later Hellenistic poet Aratus, in his astronomical poem Phaenomena, took up the same image directly, describing Dike, or Justice, as the last of the immortals to abandon a degenerating humanity and identifying her afterward with the constellation Virgo, a direct continuation of Hesiod's Aidos and Nemesis leaving the earth for Olympus at the close of the Iron Age passage in Works and Days.