Excerpt from The Muses Pageant, Vol. 2: Myths Legends of Ancient Greece
"He that sang the Works and Days" - whom, following antiquity, we may be content to call Hesiod - enumerates five races of mankind who successively inhabited earth down to his own time. The first of these he calls the Golden, to express their perfection; the second, the Silver, on account of their inferiority to the first. Both these races passed away without issue; for not until a third race had been created, and civilised, by Prometheus, did Zeus create the First Woman - Pandora, to be the bane of man. Now Hesiod calls this third race the Bronze; not merely because they were worse than their predecessors, but because, as he says, "of bronze was their gear, of bronze were their houses, and with bronze they tilled the soil; black iron there was none." Here, then, he seems to have engrafted on his allegory of Man's Fall and Decline a vague tradition of the great Bronze Age which we now know to have preceded the Iron or Homeric Age in Greek lands.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Muses Pageant, Vol. 2 (W. M. L. Hutchinson)