Hesiod’s Functional Typology of the Races

The myth of the five races in Works and Days has been read in two incompatible ways. The popular reading takes it as a chronicle of historical decline — gold, silver, bronze, iron — with the heroes interpolated awkwardly between bronze and iron. Vernant’s structural recovery shows the chronicle reading is a misreading: the races resolve into three functional pairs, each pair structured by the dike/hubris polarity.

Vernant’s argument is built directly from the text. “In the first pair, the dominant value and the starting point is dike; hubris is secondary, treated as its counterpart. In the second pair, the opposite is true” (Vernant 1983). The age of iron is itself doubled — “two types of human existences, in strict opposition to each other, one of which acknowledges dike, while the other knows only hubris” (Vernant 1983). The succession of races in time “reflects a permanent, hierarchical order in the universe” (Vernant 1983); it is non-temporal value made narrative.

The thread the Lineage receives from this is that Hesiodic mythology is already psychological mythology — the races are standing typological possibilities for human existence under divine measure, sorted by their relation to the principles that govern that measure. This is what makes Hesiod, not merely Homer, the headwater of the tradition’s ability to read myth as a phenomenology of soul.

Sources

• hesiod: the five races, the doubled iron age, the address to Perses and the basileis
• jean-pierre-vernant: structural pairing, dike/hubris polarity, non-temporal hierarchy
• shirley-sullivan: Dike as daughter of Zeus, the watchers, the rewarding and punishing order