Where the Golden Age is defined chiefly by what its people had, ease, plenty and long life without old age, the Silver Age is defined chiefly by what its people failed to do: honor the gods, restrain their own violence toward each other, and grow past a childishness that Hesiod stretches implausibly across a full century. Jenny Strauss Clay reads this shift as the first step in the poem's larger argument that each age after the first represents a further move away from divine favor, brought on by the race's own conduct rather than imposed on them for no reason, a pattern the Bronze Age intensifies and the Heroic Age, which follows it, interrupts.
The Silver Age has drawn far less independent literary attention than the Golden or Iron Ages that bracket the sequence, appearing mainly as a transitional stage in retellings of the whole five-age scheme rather than as a subject in its own right, and Hesiod's own account of it is correspondingly brief in comparison with the fuller treatment he gives the age he says he lives in himself, the Iron Age. When Ovid retold the sequence in Latin in the Metamorphoses, he preserved Hesiod's basic four-metal decline, Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron, but dropped the Heroic Age insertion entirely, folding its material back into a straightforward four-stage decline, which shows that even a close and admiring imitator did not treat Hesiod's five-part scheme as fixed or beyond alteration.