Ages of Man
The Ages of Man are a historical stages of human existence according to Greek mythology as living as its subsequent Roman interpretation.
Both Hesiod & Ovid produced accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to move from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a near divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains together with evils. In the two accounts that equal from ancient Greece and Rome, this degradation of the human condition over time is forwarded symbolically with metals of successively decreasing improvement but increasing hardness.