A second explanation of a very different sort was given, one which was in reality a profound attempt to trace man’s origin as well as to explain his actual condition.[68] This is the story of the five ages of man, beginning with the age of gold in which gods and men dwelt together. Then mortals lived like the gods with hearts untroubled, far from toil and suffering, and the earth yielded them of its own accord abundant food. Over them Cronos reigned. But the men of this Utopian age died in painless sleep; and the silver age under Zeus followed. Compared with the former it was an age of degeneracy in which men showed insolence toward one another and failed to sacrifice to the gods. Zeus in his anger destroyed these mortals. The three remaining ages—the bronze, the heroic, and the iron, show both decay and advance. The men of the bronze age were fierce, wild creatures, unapproachable in their savagery. To these succeeded a better and juster race, that of the heroes, who however met their fate in war beneath seven-gated Thebes or at Troy for fair-haired Helen’s sake. And now they dwell care-free in the Islands of the Blest. Finally Hesiod pictures his own age, that of iron. Now no longer do men spend their effort in war and battle, but they have come to a selfish individualism, “when father and children will not agree together, nor guest with host, nor friend with friend, nor brother longer be dear as aforetime.”[69] But this unlimited egoism, which Hesiod pictures, presupposes an intellectual evolution beyond the stage where men fought in masses as in the heroic time. Thus faithfully and relentlessly he describes his own day. Yet the poet is not without confidence that there are good as well as evil elements in the age of iron; but on the whole he is despondent and exclaims: “Would that I were not living in the fifth age of men, but that I had either died before them or been born later.”[70] Thus Hesiod takes ancient myths and by his genius makes them epitomize the stages of man’s evolution downward morally, but forward intellectually. The faint hope expressed at the end of the exclamation just quoted shows that the poet saw the possibility of a better age to come, and therein he showed himself a prophet. He apparently did not regard the present age of iron as eternal, but perhaps, in accordance with the cyclical theory of the world, thought that the ages might revolve and the Golden Age return again. Furthermore, although he regards man’s course as largely one of degeneration, he sees that it has also been one in which intellectual progress has been made and law developed. When we come to the question of life beyond the grave we must acknowledge that herein Hesiod shows no advance over Homer. For ordinary mortals oblivion in the dank halls of Hades seems to be the relentless doom. Only a few, the heroes of that earlier age are allowed by divine favor to dwell with hearts free from trouble in the Islands of the Blest.