The Ages Of Men

The Ages of Man are the stages of human existence on theEarth according to Classical mythology. Two classicalauthors in particular offer accounts of thesuccessive agesof mankind, which tend to progress from an original,long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divineexistence to the current age of the writer, in whichhumansare beset by innumerable pains and evils. In the twoaccounts that survive from ancient Greece and Rome, thisdegradation of the human condition over time is indicatedsymbolically with metals of successively decreasingvalue.