The Poor Poet (1837) by Carl SpitzwegGrohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering
Epic poems are often the earliest recorded stories of a culture. All over the world, stories can offer glimpses into what a society values, and what importance or significance is given to material culture.
By examining the stories of epics, we learn how people from past cultures thought about the industries they saw around them.
These two works are from a set of four paintings which represent history as the Four Ages of Man depicted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. The Four Ages mark the stages of human existence with the value of the metal decreasing as human greed and discord increase.
The Age of Bronze (c.1580) by Pauwels Franck (called Paulo Fiammingo)Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering
The Age of Bronze
A ruler seated on a raised dais receives treasures from traders, which will be passed along to those who work in the palace, such as the gardeners in the background.
Heroes of Old
In stories such as Homer’s Iliad or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Bronze Age was marked by the grandeur of people of myth: Achilles, Ajax, and other heroes.
Moral Decline
However, in addition to selfless heroes,
there are greedy people, such as those who attempt to pocket wealth for themselves.
The Age of Iron (c.1580) by Pauwels Franck (called Paulo Fiammingo)Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering
The Age of Iron
By the Iron Age, people knew more about the world around them, from travel to industry. The quality of ships and tools improve as people use iron, rather than bronze, in their work.
The Age of Iron
However, this increased knowledge of navigation and metalworking has not led to an increase in exchanges of goods and ideas across cultures.
Societal Breakdown
Sailors—more akin to pirates—
raid a harbor town,
threatening and murdering
the residents as they steal.
People are self-serving and destructive.
The last Age was of hard iron. Immediately every species of crime burst forth, in this age of degenerated tendencies; modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
(1893 translation by Henry T. Riley)
The Element of Fire/Vulcan's Forge (c.1585) by Student of Francesco Bassano the YoungerGrohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was married to Hephaestus, the god of fire and technology, but had an affair with Ares, the handsome brother of Hephaestus.
The two would request Hephaestus go to his forge
and create jewelry and weapons in order to distract him.
Helios, the sun god, sees the entire world and its goings-on from his chariot in the skies.
Because he knows of Ares and Aphrodite’s affair, he informs Hephaestus about their deceit.
Broken-hearted, Hephaestus retreats to his workshop. He develops a plan to prove his wife’s infidelity and his brother’s betrayal in order to demand a divorce and to shame the pair.
Hephaestus develops an infamous golden net,
so thin it is functionally invisible,
yet so strong no god or goddess could break it.
Hephaestus’s plan is to use the net to capture
Ares and Aphrodite together and embarrass them
in front of all the other gods of Olympus.
Hephaestus, hearing the heart-wounding story,
bustled towards his forge, brooding on his revenge—
planted the huge anvil on his block and beat out the chains,
not to be slipped or broken, all to pin the lovers to the spot.
The Odyssey
Homer
(1996 translation by Robert Fagles)
Bending Iron and Steel
Iron working is an ancient technique. It originated in sub-Saharan Africa roughly four thousand years ago, and iron tools and the knowledge to make them spread across the world from that point on.
Sunjata, one of the most famous epic poems to come out of West Africa, references the value of metal—particularly iron—and the intense labor required to produce and shape it into useful tools.
In this passage from the epic, the hero of the story, Sunjata, a king and mighty warrior, has fallen. He lies on the ground, unable to rise.
His people make a pair of metal crutches for him. This entails mining the ore, then smelting it to make iron, and eventually forging the iron into the desired shape.
When Sunjata attempts to stand with the aid of these metal rods, the iron bends under his great strength, conveying his heroic identity.
At that time they used to smelt ore and make iron from it;
The smiths put bellows to the ore,
And when they had melted the ore they made it into iron,
And they forged the iron and made it into rods–
Two rods.
They put one into one of his hands,
And they put the other into his other hand,
And said that he must get up.
When he had grasped the rods, they both broke.
They said, ‘How will Sunjata get up?’
He himself said to them, ‘Call my mother;
When a child has fallen down, it is his mother who picks him up.’
When his mother came,
He laid his hand upon his mother’s shoulder,
And he arose and stood up.
Sunjata: Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute
(1999 translation by Gordon Innes)
Stories can predate written language--two of the poems featured here were recorded hundreds of years after they were initially told. Because stories can be preserved in oral tradition, they can provides clues to the lives and values of cultures we otherwise would very little about.
