Editing Greek Mythology (section)

=== Part IV - The Five Ages of Man ===
Hesiod, being the depressed schmuck he is, came up with a very interesting concept to say that the antique zoomers were lazy bums and his generation was the best. He went on to tell the tale of the five ages of men. Because you see, the Olympians didn't just create humanity once, but at least five times. Buckle up, there's a lot to unravel.

First, let's go back to the time of daddy Cronos. Yes, because we were actually always there, the entire time. Well, "we", the golden men were. To have some company, the Olympians created the Men of Gold. And they actually lived with them. They danced, and sung, sunbathed, mused, wrote, played and even, possibly, did the deed with the gods themselves. They lived for a very long time and never actually showed any sign of age. They weren't immortal though, as at some point, they would die of old age, although peacefully and without knowing illness or crippleness. Plato later precised that they weren't literally made out of gold, but that they were gentle and noble. Some even hinted at the idea that they were very adventurous and carefree. But eventually, the Men of Gold never struggled in life and rarely reproduced, and now their spirits dwell as Daemons. Well, another variant of Daemons, serving as protectors of future mortals. Basically guardian angels.

Then, the Silver Age kicked in. When Zeus took control, the Men of Silver came forth. Nobody knows who actually made them, but they did live exactly one hundred years under the juridiction of their mothers. They were... Pretty violent. Matter of fact, they had a very short time of adulthood, and they mostly spent it fighting each other. More likely dueling than actual going onto wars, because they themselves were very few in numbers. Just like their predecessors, some might say. However, Zeus never took a liking in them because they were filthy atheists. So, absolutely reviled by their lack of worship and their impiety, Zeus fucking whipped them out of existence. Well, not entirely because they soon came back as the "blessed spirits of the Underworld". Probably serving as Hades' underlings... If he really every needed that. 

Enter the Bronze Age. And Oh boy, the Men of that era had '''absolutely zero fucks to give'''. Because you see, in the grimdarkness of the Bronze Age of Men, there is only war. Not that is has anything to do with the actual bronze age, but this era was marked by one thing. The Men loved a good fight, and they loved bronze. Their armor was bronze, their houses were made out of bronze, their tools were fabricated with bronze, and they forged their weapons with bronze. They had bronze everywhere. This is probably because bronze was very sought after at the time of Hesiod. Zeus didn't even bother with them. For they were already good at destroying themselves. They bashed each other's heads all the time. War was their whole life. They just couldn't live without it. Which is why their petty wars ended when they all died... In a flood. You know who caused it? Zeus. Because he was absolutely reviled by the idea of human sacrifices. So when King Lycaon of Arcadia sacrificied a boy in his name, the god of all gods said "fuck this" and brought a deluge. The sole survivor of this world ending catastrophe was Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, who escape with the flood by the use of chest that carried him the entire timem.

And then finally, we have the Heroic Age. [[Conan the Barbarian|And it was an age undreamed of]]. Tragedies, battles, heroes vanquishing tyrants, gods brawling other gods, monsters slaying... That's when every Greek Myth happened. But alas, to Hesiod, that was all in the past. All the men of this age went to Elysium and are now enjoying a lofty afterlife. Hesiod stated that now men are living in the Iron Age and [[Grognard|are doomed to make even worse mistakes than the men of previous ages. Because they deserve nothing and are all corrupt and terrible. And young people are stupid too.]] Typical Hesiod take.

Why Hesiod and many other classical Greek considered thier time of the iron age to be a downgrade to the achievement of the past? Is the same Mythologizing relationship the late Romans had after/during the slow-mo implosion of the Roman Empire and the basis of the often-used fantasy trope [[Tolkien]] codified. Before classical Greece, everyone knows, thier was Mycenaean Greece, the civilization that defined Greece's bronze age (as they had the infrastructure to mass produce bronze). Of course, because of a poorly documented economic collapse, as people do during a system crash, everyone fled the slowly denigrating cities for the more stable rural life and new smaller fiefdoms. With population centers and the trade economy in shambles, of course, the art of bronze forging became impractical and lost, forcing everyone to downgrade to rudimentary and cruddy iron tools (thus the iron age). If you were a sheep farmer and, say, crumbling pre-apocalypse irreplaceable engineering feats, of course, you would say the past was superior and be the setting for your epics (even if their own mythology was different by cultural evolution over time). Even when technology caught back up to pre-collapse, you [[Tolkien|always have pessimists and romantics]] like Hesiod that believed the [[The Silmarillion|height of technology and the quality of humans were at a specific point in the past and could never be reached again]].

So yeah, that's where we came from... Or IS IT? You see, there is another story, this time told by Socrates, that says that men actually had a different origin. Once, Men and Women were the same beings. We were all tough, independent, and so strong we could rival the gods. We had two heads, four legs, and four arms. At one point, we wanted to take Mount Olympus for ourselves, and Zeus kicked our ass so hard that we split into two. So now Men and Women existed as two separate beings. Bear in mind that Socrates used this story to explain how Love came to be, saying that we are basically always looking for who is our other half. Yeah, have we told you yet that Greek Mythology can get weird? It can get weird sometimes.