Thank the gods and heroes that such decadent and boorish behavior never occured at the end of the Stone Age, when copper & bronze were discovered, and only used for peaceful and benevolent purposes!
Calling the start of the Iron Age "The Catastrophe" beggars belief. Spoken like true Luddites, still worshipping at the feet of The Noble Savage, denouncinging that most evil of all evils, the Mother Gaea raping iron plow.
My hat is off to any thinking person who can stand reading both Part I and Part II in their entirity, without gagging: they get the Iron Stomach Award with Bronze Cluster.
You missed the point. You should read further.
Iron’s initial use was no benefit to the human. It was used to destroy what civilization existed. You are reading way too much into it’s later use and benefits and ignoring real history.
There were no great Stone Age civilizations equivalent to the Bronze Age ones for the Bronze users to destroy. No literacy, no great cities, no thriving economies only small localized societies on the edge of starvation.
There is also no question that there was a centuries old Dark Age which descended upon Greece after the Trojan War where most of the benefits of the prior civilization were lost to all. Iron initial result was that it allowed the arming of barbarians from the north precipitating a holocaust previously unknown to the civilized world.
That is the most ignorant statement in regards to history I have ever read.
You don't get to make a judgement call on how people felt back then. You only can note that Hesiod's view was what it was and many people accepted it.
You make the - what I feel - is the disgusting mistake of judging history form your own perspective. because of people like you the Athenian democratic experiment is damned because women did not have the right to vote and the Athenians owned slaves.