The upright judgments and the unrighteous ways."
—E. 331-340.
In the second or silver age began declension and degeneracy. The blessedness of this race consisted in long retention of childhood and its innocence—even up to a hundred years. Manhood attained, it became quarrelsome, irreligious, and ungrateful to the gods—its creators. This generation soon had an end:—
Since to the blessed deities of heaven
They gave not those respects they should have given.
But when the earth had hid these, like the rest,
They then were called the subterrestrial blest,
And in bliss second, having honours then
Fit for the infernal spirits of powerful men."
—C. 135-142.
In Hesiod's account of this race it is curious to note a correspondence with holy Scripture as to the term of life in primitive man; curious, too, that Jove is not said to have created, but to have laid to sleep, the silver race. It obtained from men, after its demise, the honours of propitiatory sacrifice, and represented the "blessed spirits of the departed," and perhaps the "Manes" of the Latin, without, however, attaining to immortality. A rougher type was that of the brazen age, which the Elizabethan translator Chapman seems right in designating as
"Of wild ash fashioned, stubborn and austere,"—
though another way of translating the words which he
