Heroic Age

The Heroic Age is the fourth of the five ages Hesiod enumerates in the [[myth-of-the-races|Works and Days]] — inserted between the bronze age and the iron age — as the time of the demigods who fought at Thebes and at Troy: the age of which the [[iliad|Iliad]], the [[odyssey|Odyssey]], and the epic cycle sing. Hesiod’s insertion of the Heroic Age into the downward sequence of metal ages (gold, silver, bronze, iron) marks it as the moment of the tradition’s own heroic self-consciousness — an age that knows itself to be already past and that pitches itself as the measure against which the iron-age present falls short.

For depth psychology, the Heroic Age is the cultural period in which the heroic ego as a psychological form is articulated in the Greek tradition — the ego structured around imperishable fame, defined by its great deeds, willing to choose a short life with glory over a long life without. Neumann‘s [[neumann-origins-history-consciousness|Origins and History of Consciousness]] reads the heroic age cross-culturally as the stage at which ego-consciousness differentiates itself against the matriarchal-uroboric ground. See heroic-ego and homeric-plural-self.

Relationships

• myth-of-the-races
• heroic-ego
• kleos-aphthiton