Myth of the Races

The myth of the races is Hesiod’s great structural figure in the Works and Days: the human condition unfolds across five races — gold, silver, bronze, the race of heroes, and iron. Vernant resists reading this as a simple chronological decline. The insertion of the race of heroes between bronze and iron breaks any linear narrative of decay: “As far as the heroes are concerned, all interpretations agree: Hesiod expressly says they are superior to the men who preceded them. It is thus perfectly clear that they interrupt the process of decline” (Vernant 1983).

Vernant reads the myth structurally as a cycle from pure Dike to pure hubris: “In the age of gold, everything was order, justice, and joy: this was the reign of pure dike. By the end of the cycle, in the latter part of the age of iron, everything will be abandoned to disorder, violence, and death: this will be the reign of pure hubris” (Vernant 1983, pp. 60–61). The races also align, in dialogue with Dumézil, with the tripartite functional scheme — sovereignty (gold and silver), warrior-force (bronze and heroes), productive labor (iron) — and with a paired moral polarity between the good eris of productive emulation and the evil eris of lies and perjury in the agora. The men of gold “live, in all their justice, ethelēmoi hēsuchoi,” peaceful and unacquainted with eris; the end of the iron age, by contrast, will know “hubris alone honored… Human speech will take the form of lies, deceit, and perjury” (Vernant 1983, on Works and Days 191–196). The myth is thus a structural map of permanent human possibilities — coexisting just and unjust, productive and destructive — within a single world, and supplies a classical parallel to the Jungian reading of archetypal polarity: dike against hubris as a standing psychic tension rather than a historical stage.

The myth also contains an alternative model of temporality. “The past is punctuated not by any chronology but by genealogies. … Each generation, each race (genos) has its own time, its own age, the duration, flow, and even orientation of which may be different in every respect from those of all the others. The past is stratified into a sequence of races. These races make up ancient time, but they still exist, and some of them are more real than present-day life and the contemporary race of humans” (Vernant 1983, p. 57). Mythic time is stratified, not chronological — a structural premise the depth tradition will inherit wholesale.

Relationships

• works-and-days
• dike
• hubris
• heroic-age
• myth-of-er
• succession-myth

Primary sources

• works-and-days (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE, lines 106–201)
• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)