Golden Age (metaphor)

Golden Age (metaphor)

A golden age is a period in a field of endeavor when great tasks were accomplished. The term originated from early Greek and Roman poets who used to refer to a time when mankind lived in a better time and was pure (see Golden Age).

The origin of the term is with the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, who introduced it as a period in his Works and Days as the period where the "Golden Race" of man lived. This was part of fivefold division of Ages of Man, starting with the Golden age, then the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of Heroes (including the Trojan War) and finally the current Iron Age. The concepth was further refined by Ovid in his Metamorphoses into the four "metal ages" (golden, silver, bronze, iron).

Famous quotes containing the words golden and/or age:

“Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)