Ages of Man
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- This article is about mythological ages. For the "Seven Ages of Man" speech from Shakespeare's "As You Like It", see All the world's a stage.
The Ages of Man are the stages of human existence on the Earth according to Classical mythology. Two classical authors in particular offer accounts of the successive ages of mankind, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. In the two accounts that survive from ancient Greece and Rome, this degradation of the human condition over time is indicated symbolically with metals of successively decreasing value.
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Ages of Man" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
