Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video we’re going to discuss the five races (gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron) of humanity as they are laid out in one of the myths of Greek mythology.
Let’s get into it.
In Greek mythology, there are 3 myths about the creation of humanity: one where the Titan Prometheus is the creator, one involving a man and a woman who throw stones over their shoulders, and one in which there are five races created in succession through divine experimentation. We’re going to quickly summarise the first two before spending the majority of the video covering the five races.
In the first version, Prometheus and Epimetheus were tasked with the creation of humanity by Zeus. Prometheus, the intelligent brother, was hindered in this because Epimetheus, characterised by impulsivity and simplemindedness, apportioned all of the survival traits to other animals, leaving humans without a defence mechanism when it was their time to be created. To compensate for this, Prometheus bestowed them with noble form, giving them the upright appearance of the gods, and he went up to heaven and used the sun to light a torch, bringing it back down to the mortal plane and gifting fire to humanity. In the second version, mankind had grown so wicked that Zeus and Poseidon used their powers in concert to flood the world. Brought to the brink of extermination, humanity was saved by Prometheus, who warned his son Deucalion of the impending disaster. Together with his wife, Pyrrah, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora, Deucalion found salvation aboard a boat, allowing the pair to ride out the seas rising up and consuming the continents. Eventually, Zeus relented and the water receded, and Deucalion and Pyrrha became the progenitors of the human race, but in unconventional fashion. The two of them threw stones over their shoulders, and each stone thrown in this way became a person, Deucalion’s becoming men and Pyrrha’s becoming women.
Watch the video for the rest!
