Thomas Taylor on the Ages of Man

[sdi]

The different ages of men which are celebrated by Hesiod, in his Works and Days, are not to be understood literally, as if they once really subsisted, but only as signifying, in beautiful poetical images, the mutations of human lives from virtue to vice, and from vice to virtue. For earth was never peopled with men either wholly virtuous or vicious; since the good and the bad have always subsisted together on its surface, and always will subsist. However, in consequence of the different circulations of the heavens, there are periods of fertility and sterility, not only with respect to men, but likewise to brutes and plants. Hence places naturally adapted to the nurture of the philosophical genius, such as Athens and Egypt, will, in periods productive of a fertility of souls, such as was formerly the case, abound with divine men: but in periods such as the present, in which there is every where a dreadful sterility of souls, through the general prevalence of a certain most irrational and gigantic impiety as Proclus elegantly calls the established religion of his time, in Plat. Polit. p. 369—at such periods as these, Athens and Egypt will no longer be the seminaries of divine souls, but will be filled with degraded and barbarous inhabitants. And such, according to the arcana of ancient philosophy, is the reason of the present general degradation of mankind. Not that formerly there were no such characters as now abound, for this would be absurd, since mankind always have been, and always will be, upon earth, a mixture of good and bad, in which the latter will predominate; but that during the fertile circulations of the heavens, in consequence of there being a greater number of men than when a contrary circulation takes place, men will abound who adorn human nature, and who indeed descend for the benevolent purpose of leading back apostate souls to the principles from which they fell. As the different ages therefore of Hesiod signify nothing more than the different lives which each individual of the human species passes through; hence an intellectual life is implied by the golden age. For such a life is pure, and free from sorrow and passion; and of this impassivity gold is an image, through its never being subject to rust or putrefaction. Such a life, too, is with great propriety said to be under Saturn, because Saturn, as we have a little before observed, is pure intellect.—But for a larger account of this interesting particular, and of the allegorical meaning of the different ages celebrated by Hesiod, see Proclus upon Hesiod, p. 39, &c.

(Thomas Taylor, footnote to Plato's Cratylus)

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I haven't found an English translation of Proclus's fragmentary commentary on the Works and Days, but it's interesting to me that he (and Taylor) consider it to be an ethical allegory (following Plato) rather than a cosmological allegory. Personally, I disagree (not that their interpretation is wrong, merely that I think it departs too widely from Hesiod's purpose of explaining why the world sucks): I think that when Hesiod refers to Kronos, he refers to the Intellect; and when he refers to Zeus, he refers to the World Soul; hence, the golden race living under Kronos represents the dæmons betwixt the gods and man, while all the other races living under Zeus refer to "waves" of the development of human consciousness or civilization, of which we are presently at the tail end of the fourth, which will end when the world is too polluted for humanity to thrive.