Ovid's Metamorphoses, composed in the years around 8 CE, is the version of the ages-of-man scheme that reached the largest later audience, compressing Hesiod's five ages to four metals and fixing the golden-silver-bronze-iron sequence that European literature inherited; where Hesiod's poem was known directly to relatively few, Ovid's was a schoolroom text across the medieval and early modern West, and it is chiefly through Ovid that the scheme survives in ordinary cultural memory as "the golden age" and its declining successors.
The Enlightenment idea of progress was constructed, in significant part, as the myth's deliberate inversion. Where the ages-of-man scheme places perfection in the unrecoverable past and treats the present as the worst point yet, thinkers including Turgot and Condorcet in eighteenth-century France proposed instead that history is a cumulative advance in knowledge and human capacity, running the arrow the other way, and this newer story rather than the older one now supplies the default framework for most modern political and scientific self-description.
Neither myth has displaced the other in practice, and both continue to organise rhetoric that presents itself as simple observation. Appeals to a lost golden age recur across very different eras and causes, from Roman writers idealising the early Republic to modern political movements promising a return to a better prior condition, and the appeal works the same way each time: it does not need to identify exactly when the golden age occurred, only to assert that decline from it can be measured and, implicitly, reversed.