So far we trace intelligibly enough the moralizing vein: we find the revolutions of the past so arranged as to serve partly as an ethical lesson, partly as a suitable preface to the present.[154] But fourth in the list comes “the divine race of Heroes:” and here a new vein of thought is opened by the poet. The symmetry of his ethical past is broken up, in order to make way for these cherished beings of the national faith. For though the author of the “Works and Days” was himself of a didactic cast of thought, like Phokylidês, or Solôn, or Theognis, yet he had present to his feelings, in common with his countrymen, the picture of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in the current mythes, and still more in Homer and those other epical productions which were then the only existing literature and history. It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch of the past, either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these poems ennobled; and even if he himself could have consented to such an exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his hearers. But the chiefs who figured before Thêbes and Troy could not be well identified either with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race: moreover it was essential that they should be placed in immediate contiguity with the present race, because their descendants, real or supposed, were the most prominent and conspicuous of existing men. Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the fourth place in the series, and to interrupt the descending ethical movement in order to interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither of which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet himself unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the heroic, but of the brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating pugnacity which characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests an aggregate of smaller and meaner vices and mischiefs. It will not perish by suicidal extinction—but it is growing worse and worse, and is gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will not vouchsafe to preserve much longer such a race upon the earth. [154] Aratus (Phænomen. 107) gives only three successive races,—the golden, silver, and brazen; Ovid superadds to these the iron race (Metamorph. i. 89-144): neither of them notice the heroic race. The observations both of Buttmann (Mythos der ältesten Menschengeschlechter, t. ii. p. 12 of the Mythologus) and of Völcker (Mythologie des Japetischen Geschlechts, § 6, pp. 250-279) on this series of distinct races, are ingenious, and may be read with profit. Both recognize the disparate character of the fourth link in the series, and each accounts for it in a different manner. My own view comes nearer to that of Völcker, with some considerable differences; amongst which one is, that he rejects the verses respecting the dæmons, which seem to me capital parts of the whole scheme.