Excerpt from The Muses Pageant, Vol. 2: Myths Legends of Ancient Greece Now this better race clearly does not belong to the original scheme, and we see that our poet puts it in to meet the following difficulty; every one knew that in the not very distant past there had lived and laboured in Greece illustrious Heroes, men godlike and sprung from gods, the theme Of every minstrel's art how could these be members, as by genealogical computation they must, either Of the wicked Bronze or of the still more wicked Iron Race? How account for a Heracles, a Theseus, and, later still, an Achilles, if mankind has been steadily growing worse and weaker ever since the passing of the Age Of Gold? Hesiod cuts the knot by assuming a pause, or rather a temporary upward movement, in the secular decline Of things; this happier period was the Age Of the Heroes, who were a distinct race, made by Zeus. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.