Sometime around the eighth century BCE, in his poem Works and Days (lines 106–201), the Greek poet Hesiod set down a history of humanity as a sequence of declining races: a golden race that lived like gods without toil; a silver race, lesser and quarrelsome; a bronze race, hard and warlike; and — after a brief interruption for the age of heroes — an iron race, his own, of whom he writes: would that I were not among them, but had died before or been born after; for now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night.
Half a world away, Indian tradition tells of four yugas — Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali — through which dharma, pictured as a bull, loses one leg per age, standing in the last on a single leg. The Kali Yuga description in the Bhagavata Purana could sit beside Hesiod's iron-age lament with barely a seam.
The parallels
Both systems count four declining ages (gold–silver–bronze–iron; and the yugas' dice-named sequence from the perfect throw to the losing one). Both make the decline moral before it is material — what decays first is reverence, truthfulness, hospitality. Both place the writer in the worst age, and both temper despair: Hesiod immediately pivots to two hundred lines of practical counsel on honest work, and the Bhagavata closes its dark chapter by naming the age's unique grace. Neither text is a shrug; both are instructions for living in late times.
The differences — which matter as much
Hesiod's ages end; the story is linear, and what follows the iron race he does not say. The yugas turn: Kali completes and Satya returns, endlessly — time as a wheel, not a road. And the scales differ wildly: Hesiod's ages are mythic generations; the yugas run to hundreds of thousands of years. Whether the two schemes share a distant Indo-European ancestor or arose independently from the same human experience — elders always remembering a better world — is a genuinely open scholarly question, and we leave it open.
Related
Impermanence across the traditions · The Stoic conflagration · Marcus Aurelius, verse by verse