The Golden Age describes a time long ago when the ancients enjoyed a world of universal peace and happiness.  In his Stories of Gods and Heroes, Thomas Bulfinch recounts just how they described this beautiful era and how it eventually deteriorated into the miserable ages that eventually followed.  He says:

“The first age was an age of innocence and happiness, called the Golden Age.  Truth and right prevailed, though not enforced by law, nor was there any magistrate to threaten or punish.  The forest had not yet been robbed of its trees to furnish timbers for vessels, nor had men built fortifications round their town.  There was no such things as swords, spears, or helmets.  The earth brought forth all things necessary for man, without his labor in plowing or sowing.   Perpetual spring reigned, flowers sprang up without seed, the rivers flowed with milk and wine, and yellow honey distilled from the oaks.

“Then succeeded the Silver Age, more savage of temper, and readier to the strife of arms, yet not altogether wicked.   The hardest and worst was the Iron Age.  Crime burst in like a flood, modesty, truth, and honor fled.  In their places came fraud and cunning, violence and the wicked love of gain.  Then seamen spread sails to the wind and the trees were torn from the mountains to serve for keels to ships, and vex the face of the ocean.  The earth, which till now had been cultivated in common, began to be divided off into possessions.  Men were not satisfied with what the surface produced, but must dig into its bowels, and draw forth from thence the ores of metals.  Mischievous iron and more mischievous gold were produced.  War sprang up, using both as weapons, the guest was not safe in the friend’s house, and sons-in-law and fathers-in-law, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, could not trust one another.  Some wished their fathers dead, that they might come to the inheritance; family love lay prostrate.  The earth was wet with slaughter, and the gods abandoned it, one by one . . .”

In his version of Metamorphoses, Nathan C. Brooks wrote an interesting piece on The Golden Age and those ages that followed, and his words are worth repeating.  First, he wrote a brief summary, and then started his commentary on a record originally set down by the Greek poet Hesiod, who included it in his work Theogony, around the eighth century B.C.  Ovid, a Roman poet, living at the time of Christ, based his account of Hesiod’s and his bolded words follow Brook’s comments that follow:

“Four ages successively arise, of which the golden is the first.  In this age innocence and happiness reign, and men subsist upon the bounty of the earth.  Saturn, at this time, holds the empire of the world.”

He went on in his “Explicatio” to explain that

“The deterioration of manners, from primitive innocence to extreme wickedness, is represented under the names of metals, that lessen respectively in purity and value.  In the prophecy of Daniel [c. 600 B.C.], the four principal monarchies are prefigured under the images of gold, silver, brass, and iron.  A similar designation of the four ages, by our poet [Ovid] might seem derived from this source, were it not that Hesiod, whom he follows, and who wrote anterior to Daniel, represented different ages by the name of metals.  The only difference between Hesiod and Ovid is that the former has an additional age, called the Heroic.  The Golden Age of the poet is a tradition of the period of man’s innocence, and residence in Paradise, when the elements were pure and genial, the productions of the earth plentiful and spontaneous, and the different animals peaceful and submissive.  All heathen nations have some tradition of this period.

“In the comment of Hierocles upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, we meet with the following explanation of the Golden Age:  ‘We say the Golden Age was the best among the generations of men, by reason that we make a comparison of manners from the difference of metals; for, gold is a mater wholly pure, and not at all allied unto earth, as other things are of the same kinds, as silver, brass, and iron.  Among all, nature has ordained the principality unto gold, which alone does not contract rust, but every one of the rest does, in proportion as it partakes of the earth.  Now, the rust of the earth, being compared with the corruption contracted from the body, that holy and pure age, wholly purged from all infection of wickedness, was very rightly called Golden.’

“The Sabbatic year of the Jews, in which there was no tillage of the ground, nor propriety in the spontaneous productions of the earth, nor continuance of servitude, was a memorial of the rest in Paradise, when God [the Elohim] dwelt with men.  It was, no doubt, in commemoration of the same events, preserved by tradition, that labor was suspended, and servants [and slaves] released from ordinary toil, during the Saturnalia [the ancient festival described above], which were instituted to recall the felicity of the Golden Age, when the god Saturn reigned upon earth.”

After Saturn was driven to the shadowy land of death,” reads Ovid Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries:

“Heaven was no safer

Giants [asteroids] attacked the very throne of Heaven,

Piled Pelion on Ossa, mountain on mountain,

Up to the very stars, Jove struck them down

With thunderbolts, and the bulk of those huge bodies

Lay on the earth, and bled, and Mother Earth,

Made pregnant by their blood, brought forth new bodies,

And gave them, to recall her older offspring,

The forms of men.  And this new stock was also

Contemptuous of gods, and murder-hungry

And violent.  You would know they were the sons of blood.”

The Babylonians had previously numbered and identified the attacking sky dragons or asteroids as Seven Fiery Phantoms. and the ancient incantation against the evil they wrought, translated by Harvard professor Louis Dyer, runs as follows:

Seven are they, they are seven;

     In the caverns of ocean they dwell,

They are clothed in the lightnings of heaven,

     Of their growth the deep waters can tell;

Seven are they, they are seven.

Broad is their way and their course is wide,

     Where the seeds of destruction they sow,

O’er the tops of the hills where they stride,

     To lay waste the smooth highways below,—

Broad is their way and their course is wide.

 

Man they are not, nor womankind,

     For in fury they sweep from the main,

And have wedded no wife but the wind,

     And no child have begotten but pain,—

Man they are not, nor womankind.

 

Fear is not in them, not awe;

     Supplication they need not, nor prayer,

For they know no compassion nor law,

     And are deaf to the cries of despair,—

Fear is not in them, not awe.

 

Curséd they are, they are curséd,

     They are foes to wise Êa’s name;

By the whirlwind are all things dispersed,

     On the paths of the flash of their flame,—

Curséd they are, they are curséd,

Spirit of Heaven, oh, help! Oh, Spirit of Earth!

     They are seven, thrice said they are seven,

For the gods they are Bearers of Thrones,

     But for men they are Breeders of Dearth,

And the authors of sorrows and moans.

     They are seven, thrice said they are seven.

Spirit of Heaven, oh, help! Oh, Spirit of Earth!

For more on The Golden Age, read Larry Brian Radka's 336-page scientific and historical study of asteroids and comets with respect to the Bible's book of Revelation—Astronomical Revelations or 666.