Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek poet who lived around 700 BCE at Ascra in Boeotia. He is among the earliest Greek poets whose work survives, and he speaks about himself in his poems, which is rare for the period.

His Theogony tells how the gods were born and how Zeus came to rule, including the imprisonment of the Titans in Tartarus behind bronze gates guarded by the Hundred-Handed giants. His Works and Days is advice on farming and honest living, but it also contains the myth of the five races of humanity: gold, silver, bronze, a race of heroes, and the present race of iron. Each earlier race was made and then removed. Hesiod says he wishes he had not been born into the iron age, and predicts Zeus will destroy it too.

Scholars compare the metal ages to Nebuchadnezzar's statue in Daniel 2, to Persian visions of metal ages, and to the Hindu yugas, and often read the race of heroes as an insertion into an older four-metal scheme. Writers on lost civilizations read the sequence as a memory of humanity being reset.