Silver Age

The men of the race of silver follow the race of gold in the first ages of humanity… the men of silver, at the end of their extended childhood, show great excess in relation to one another (hubrin ... auk edunanto allelon apechein) and disregard all their duties to the gods.

Vernant argues that the Silver Age constitutes the hubris-pole of a functional pair with the Golden Age, sharing the royal function but inverting dike into transgression against both neighbors and gods.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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The men of silver enjoy a lesser, or to be more precise, a 'secondary' honor compared with the royal men of gold, for they are inferior by reason of their hubris. Nevertheless, they receive an honor, which can be justified not by their virtues and merits… but by the fact that they have the same function as the men of gold.

Vernant establishes that the Silver Age's posthumous honor derives not from moral worth but from its structural correspondence to the Golden Age's royal function, even as it perverts that function.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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For they could not keep wanton hubris from each other, and they were unwilling either to be ministers to the immortals or to sacrifice on the sacred altars of the blessed ones, which is the socially right thing for men, in accordance with their local customs.

Nagy reads the Silver Age's destruction as a cultic failure — the refusal of sacrifice and divine service — which provokes Zeus's anger and frames the race's demise in terms of violated religious themis.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis

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The Silver Age, then, belongs to a long-since vanished past. The stalwarts of the Bronze Age, we are told, destroyed by their deeds, went down into the gloomy home of the dreadful Hades, nameless.

Rohde distinguishes the Silver Age from the Bronze Age by the qualified survival of its souls as hypochthonian daimones receiving worship, contrasted with the nameless annihilation awaiting the Bronze generation.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis

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The races of gold and silver are promoted, in the strict sense of the term: from being perishable beings they become daemons. As in their existence on earth, they are linked in the afterlife by opposition. The race of gold becomes epichthonian daemons, the men of silver become hupochthonian daemons.

Vernant traces the structural parallelism of Gold and Silver Ages into the eschatological domain, where their opposition as earthly versus underworld daimones mirrors their inverse moral valences in life.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, Daimones are acc. to Roth distinguished in Hesiod's daimones of the golden and silver age. Such a distinction, however, never appears in Hesiod; and it is hardly credible that the gods and spirits of ancient Greek popular belief should in this primitive period have been actually classified in accordance with such categories.

Rohde critically rejects the later philosophical imposition of a good/evil binary onto Hesiod's golden and silver daimones, insisting the moral classification is post-Hesiodic and philosophical in origin.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting

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The only possible exception is the men of silver, who live for a hundred years as children, then commit follies and die forthwith. But it is clear that such a comparison would be misleading. Only the individual members of the race of silver are portrayed as progressing toward death, through a century-long childhood.

Vernant clarifies that the Silver Age's prolonged childhood unto death is an individual-biographical trajectory, not a collective devolution, distinguishing it from any progressive degeneration across generations.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Second of another race much inferior, of silver, did the Olympian dwellers make… neither in spirit like the golden, nor in body… a child was nurtured for a hundred years with its dear mother.

The Hesiodic source text establishes the Silver Age's defining characteristics: prolonged infantile dependence, mental inferiority to the Gold, and a brief violent maturity that precipitates Zeus's wrath.

Hesiod, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting

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The succession of the races in time reflects a permanent, hierarchical order in the universe… the ages succeed one another to form a complete cycle that, once finished, starts all over again, either in the same order or, more probably, as in the myth in Plato's Statesman, in reverse order.

Vernant situates the Silver Age within a cyclical rather than linear temporal framework, arguing that Hesiod's sequence reflects a non-temporal hierarchy of values rather than irreversible historical decline.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Starting with the age of gold, when youth, justice, mutual friendship, and happiness reign, all in their pure state, we end with an age that is its opposite in every respect… 'In the age of gold, everything was order, justice, and joy… By the end of the cycle, in the latter part of the age of iron, everything will be abandoned to disorder, violence, and death.'

Vernant frames the Silver Age as the first step in a structured dialectic from pure dike to pure hubris, embedded within a cyclical cosmological rhythm rather than a simple descending progression.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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The symmetry between the posthumous destiny of the men of bronze and that of the heroes is just as marked as in the case of the men of gold and the men of silver.

Vernant underscores the structural symmetry pairing Gold with Silver and Bronze with Heroes, revealing a paired architecture of races organized around opposing eschatological fates.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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In alchemical soul-making, gold is necessarily preceded by silver. This means that gold comes out of silver, red comes from white, sun from moon, brighter awareness from lunacy.

Hillman transposes the mythological priority of Silver before Gold into an alchemical-psychological sequence where lunar silver and its attendant madness are the necessary precondition for solar golden consciousness.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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Silver corrupts in air. It tarnishes… Silver blackens in air and cannot always gleam as gold. Silver requires polishing, attention, a bit of rubbing and fussing; it calls for worry.

Hillman uses the metallurgical properties of silver — its vulnerability to tarnish and need for protective attention — as a psychological metaphor for the fragility and hiddenness of lunar imaginal consciousness.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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I speculate (silver is also worked by speculation: speculum = mirror; species = likeness, apparition, image, coin) that it is precisely this silver from the far side of the moon that provides the backing for the mind, so that it can recognize in earthly matters the planetary influences.

Hillman etymologically links silver to speculation and the mirror, proposing it as the psychic substrate enabling reflective imagination and the soul's capacity to perceive archetypal presences within mundane reality.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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There is no longer the spontaneous abundance that, during the age of gold, made living creatures and their sustenance spring from the soil simply as a result of the rule of justice, without any external intervention.

Vernant's analysis of Pandora contextually illuminates the Silver Age by contrast: the Golden Age's effortless abundance defines the deprivation-condition that silver and subsequent races must inhabit.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside

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The Stone is conceived by uniting the hot, dry, male principle (sulphur or 'our gold') with the cold, moist, female principle (argent vive or mercury, 'our silver'), the male and female seeds of metals contained in the prima materia.

Abraham's alchemical dictionary situates silver within the conjunctio of sulphur and mercury, framing the philosophical silver as the feminine lunar seed whose union with solar gold produces the philosopher's stone.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998aside

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