| Posted: 07 February 2023 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | 7
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Jose wrote:
| And what does one call the period after the "Bronze Age?" We've run out of medals at this point. |
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I don't subscribe to the notion that it comes from Olympic medals. There are plenty of Greek poets who all stick to the ages of Golden, silver, bronze in that order.
From my copy of "The Greek Myths" by Robert Graves:
According to Graves, the Golden Age derives from a tribe that worshipped the Bee-goddess, the Silver Age from tribes that worshipped the Moon-goddess,such as the Moesynoechians of the Black Sea, and the Bronze Age refers to the earliest Hellenic invaders.
Hesiod -- the Greek poet who first wrote of these ages -- was (once again according to Graves) a miserable, pessimistic man who had lived a hard life. He believed men had once lived in harmony like bees (the Golden Age) and that everything was downhill after that (with one exceptional 'Heroic Age', that of the Perseid dynasty, encompassing the warrior-kings of Mycenae descended from Perseus, such as Agamemnon).
The final age of man was the Iron Age, beginning with the Dorians of 1200BC, and encompassed the time at which Hesiod composed his poetry.
*Edited for a typo
Edited by Peter Martin on 07 February 2023 at 10:05pm
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