In this light he himself must certainly have regarded it, though, apart from a few vague memories, no historical tradition is contained in what he says of the nature and deeds of the earlier generations of mankind. His story remains an imaginary picture. And for this reason the development, as he presents it, takes a logically defined and regulated course, based on the idea of a gradual deterioration. The uneventful happiness of the first race of men who know neither virtue nor vice is followed by a second race, which after a prolonged minority displays pride and contempt of the gods. In the third, or brazen age, active wickedness breaks out, with war and murder. The last age, at the beginning of which the poet himself seems to stand, marks the breakdown of all moral restraint. The fourth race of men, to which the heroes of the Theban and Trojan wars belong, is alone among all the others in not being named and ranked after a metal. It is an alien in the evolutionary process. The downward course is checked during the fourth age, and yet in the fifth it goes on again as if it had never been interrupted. It is not apparent why that course should have been interrupted. Most of the commentators have recognized in the story of the fourth age a fragment of different material, originally foreign to the poem of the Ages of Men and added deliberately by Hesiod to this poem, which he may have taken over in its essential features from older poets. But if we adopt this view we have to ask what can have tempted the poet to such serious disturbance and dislocation of the orderly succession of the original speculative poem. It will not be enough to say that the poet, brought up in the Homeric tradition, found it impossible to pass over, in a description of the earlier ages of men, the figures of the heroic poetry which, thanks to the power of song, had acquired in the imagination of the Greeks more reality than the plainest manifestations of actual life. Nor {70} is it likely that, having in his grim description of the Bronze race introduced a darker picture of the Heroic age, drawn from a point of view different from that of the courtly Epos, he wished to set by its side this bright vision of the same age as he saw it in his own mind. If the picture of the Bronze race does really refer to the Heroic age,[33\2] giving its reverse side, so to speak, Hesiod never seems to have noticed the fact. He must have had stronger grounds than these for the introduction of his narrative. He cannot have failed to perceive that he was breaking the continuity of moral deterioration by his introduction of the Heroic race. It follows that he must have had some aim, other than that of the description of the moral deterioration of men, which he imagined himself to be serving by the introduction of this new section. This other purpose will become plain if we inquire what it is that really interests the poet in the Heroic race.