From the iliad, with another interesting comment nearby:
the god Hades is almost
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broken down by the ruthless iron chains
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Now what was that about God and iron chariots?
Two related very interesting comments here - stories of the Greeks fighting the gods, and interestingly iron technology doing better than bronze!
Are we seeing the first glimmers of science, atheism and reason here, and it being reflected in later Hebrew stories?
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The Metallic Ages of Hesiod[edit]
In his poem, Works and Days, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod between 750 and 650 BC, defined five successive Ages of Man: 1. Golden, 2. Silver, 3. Bronze, 4. Heroic and 5. Iron.[1] Only the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are based on the use of metal:[2]
"... then Zeus the father created the third generation of mortals, the age of bronze ... They were terrible and strong, and the ghastly action of Ares was theirs, and violence. ... The weapons of these men were bronze, of bronze their houses, and they worked as bronzesmiths. There was not yet any black iron."
Hesiod knew from the traditional poetry, such as the Iliad, and the heirloom bronze artifacts that abounded in Greek society, that before the use of iron to make tools and weapons, bronze had been the preferred material and iron was not smelted at all. He did not continue the manufacturing metaphor, but mixed his metaphors, switching over to the market value of each metal. Iron was cheaper than bronze, so there must have been a golden and a silver age. He portrays a sequence of metallic ages, but it is a degradation rather than a progression. Each age has less of a moral value than the preceding. Of his own age he says:[3] "And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or had been born afterward."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-age_system
07-28-2013, 10:57 AM
the Argives fight the gods!
