Humans, Heroes and Half-godsWe will look at the creation of human beings. We will discuss the “Myth of the Five Races” in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which depicts a deterioration of humanity’s lot form the earliest Golden Race down to or own Race of Iron.

We will contrast Hesiod’s description with Ovid’s in Metamorphoses and consider the implications of the differences in tone and content of the two authors.

One crucial difference is that Hesiod includes a “Race of Heroes” which Ovid omits.

We will conclude by discussing the heroes of Greek mythology and the possibility that they reflect a memory of the Mycenaean Age.

We have seen that Hesiod’s Theogony does not recount the origins of humans. Works and Days, however, does contain an account of the creation of humans. This account is often referred to as the “Myth of the Five Ages” or “Myth of the Five Races.”

Hesiod describes five successive races of humans, starting with the Golden Race and ending with our own race. The overall pattern is one of degeneration and increased hardship.

The first race, the Golden Race, was created by the immortals who dwelt on Olympus during Cronos’s reign.

They had no cares or troubles, and old age did not exist.

They did not have to work for food.

They died out but became benign spirits.

The Silver Race, also made by the Olympians, was greatly inferior to the Golden

They lived as children, nourished by their mothers, for one hundred years.

On reaching adulthood, they lived a short while but were violent and irreverent. Zeus destroyed them.

The Bronze Race was made by Zeus from ash trees. They were warlike and violent and used bronze for everything, including their homes. They too died out.

The fourth race was the Race of Heroes, which were better and more just than the Bronze Race.

Zeus created the heroes.

Hesiod calls them “demigods” and says that they were the men who fought around Thebes and Troy.

The fifth and worst race, Hesiod’s own and, by implication, ours as well, is the Race of Iron.

No creator is mentioned.

Hesiod describes the Iron Race’s lot as one of increasing hardship and toil.

The only end in sight is that conditions will get worse and worse, until finally Shame and Retribution flee the earth, and society breaks down entirely.

This account apparently contradicts the “Pandora” story, told only a few lines before it in Works and Days, in several ways. This is a reminder that Hesiod was not attempting to provide an orthodoxy.

The question of where humans came from is not the most pressing issue in Greek mythology.

These myths are, by and large, more concerned with how humans should act and how society should function than with our origins.

Bronze Age Weapons

Hesiod's story of the Five Races paints a very pessimistic view of the human condition. Ovid, writing in Rome in the 1st century B.C., used the same basic myth but gave it a very different emphasis.

In discussing the creation of humans, Ovid recaps Hesiod’s Myth of the Ages but with significant differences. Ovid’s account has no Race of Heroes between the Bronze and the Iron Races.

We are not the Iron Race; rather, the Iron Race was destroyed by a great flood.We are the offspring of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who survived the flood and threw stones over their shoulders to repeople the earth. Thus, Ovid says, we are a hardy race, showing our ancestry.

Just as “god” is a misleading translation of the term theos, so too “hero” is a misleading translation of heros.

The heroes of classical myth are not necessarily noble, good, or morally exemplary; sometimes they are quite the opposite.

This is one reason that many scholars find fault with Campbell’s discussion of heroes. he takes it as a given that “the hero” is motivated by a desire to provide a “boon” for his fellows, but this is not the case in many, in not most, Greek hero-tales.

As we saw in Ovid’s account of the creation of the world, we see here myth used as a self-conscious literary device, rather than recorded as a still-dynamic living force. Because we are separated from the earlier races, we can be more optimistic about our future than Hesiod was.

Who are these “heroes” whom Hesiod places right before our own day and Ovid leaves out of his picture of the races?

The world heros had three basic meanings in ancient Greek:

Hero could refer to a dead person who was revered and to whom sacrifices were offered and who was considered protective of a particular site or city (often because he founded it). This status by no means implied that he had been a good man, simply an extraordinary one.

Hero could refer to someone who lived in the past, particularly up to the time of the Trojan War. Again, moral qualities were not decisive.

Hero could refer to a human with one divine parent. Achilles, Heracles, and Perseus are all heroes in this sense.

A fourth sense, hero as the main character of a tragedy, is post-classical and need not concern us here.

The three main senses of the term have a great deal of overlap.

Hesiod refers to his Race of Heroes as both demigods and men who fought around Thebes and Troy.

These same legendary heroes were often claimed as ancestors and as the founders or protectors of cities.

Remember, however, that some of the most famous heroes of Greek mythology, such as Oedipus and Agamemnon, do not have divine parents.

The stories of heroes involved the sense, often found in myth, that things were different in the past.

This difference often implies that, on one time, humans had more power or greater powers than they now have.

The difference also involves the idea that gods and humans once interacted much more freely than they do now.

Classical mythology’s emphasis on heroes is unusual.

Most cultures do not have nearly as many heroes intheir mythology as Greece does, nor are those that they do have nearly so important. Mesopotamian myth, for instance, includes almost no heroes at all (with the notable exception of Gilgamesh).

It is possible that because Greek culture placed so much emphasis on the opposition of mortal and immortal, the heroes were a means of mediating that opposition. This idea that gods and human could interact was limited to the remote past.

Another possibility is that a kernel of historical truth may lie in the Greek stories of greater ancestors and a lost Golden Age.

Mycenaean civilization waned after c. 1100 B.C.; it did not suddenly disappear entirely.

Mycenaean cities, including some quite impressive architecture, would have remained more or lest intact for some time.

Mycenaean artifacts, such as pottery and jewelry, would have continued to be used.

The skills needed to construct such buildings or to create such artwork, however, would have been lost within one or two generations.

Memories of Mycenaean culture could be preserved in oral poetry, which is what seems to have happened to some extent with the Trojan War.

Thus, the Greeks of Hesiod’s time might well have the sense that their own culture had been preceded b a greater, more accomplished one, whose people were in some sense their ancestors.