Age is used specially to denote certain long periods in the history of the human race or of human civilisation. The idea of a succession of ages presented itself at a very early period to the Greek mind. The life of the race was likened to that of the individual—hence the infancy of the race might easily be imagined to be the most beautiful and serene of all. Hesiod mentions five ages—the golden, simple and patriarchal; the silver, voluptuous and godless; the brazen, warlike, wild, and violent; the heroic, an aspiration towards the better; the iron, in which justice, piety, and faithfulness had vanished from the earth, the time in which Hesiod fancied that he himself lived. Ovid imitates him, but omits the heroic age. This idea, at first perhaps a mere poetic comparison, gradually worked its way into prose. These ages were regarded as the divisions of the great world-year, which would be completed when the stars and planets had performed a revolution round the heavens, after which destiny would repeat itself in the same series of events. The golden age was said to be governed by Saturn; the silver, by Jupiter; the brazen, by Neptune; and the iron, by Pluto. The geological ages or periods will be found discussed at GEOLOGY; while the stone, bronze, and iron ages which archaeological research accepts, are treated at ARCHÆOLOGY. The Middle Ages have been so called as intervening between classical antiquity and modern times. The Dark Ages, nearly coinciding in time with the middle ages, refer to the period of intellectual darkness from the decline of classical learning, after the establishment of the barbarians in Europe in the 5th century, till the Renaissance (q.v.) in the 15th century. Modern philosophical speculation has also attempted to divide human history into definite ages or periods.
Fichte numbers five, of which he conceives that we are in the third; Hegel (q.v.) and Auguste Comte reckon three (see POSITIVISM). The word Age is also very familiar in such phrases as the Augustan Age, the Elizabethan Age, the Age of Queen Anne, &c. In the life of an individual, it is usual to speak of four ages—infancy, youth, manhood, and old age; though some physiologists (like Shakespeare in As You Like It) count seven—infancy, childhood, boyhood or girlhood, adolescence, manhood or womanhood, age, and old age. See LONGEVITY.