The Generation of Iron and the Final Stumbling Block: The Present Time in Hesiod’s Works and Days 106–201 and Barnabas 4

The four (or five) kingdom paradigm is a way of playing with time. It offers a set of symbols for structuring history, explaining the past in relation to the present and future. This paper argues that writers who draw on this king-dom paradigm do so in order to address circumstances in their own times. Part one considers Hesiod’s Works and Days 106–201, and themes from it taken up in later (Augustan period) Latin texts. Part two turns to the Epistle of Barnabas as a recalibration of the tradition found in Daniel 7. The study shows that, in each text, the periods are reworked but the timing is reinter-preted, often to represent the writer’s time as the nadir of the entire sche-ma (sometimes anticipating imminent reversal) or, rarely, as the final goal of the process. These writers variously use the paradigm to express judge-ment on their generation, offer hope, or even celebrate current triumph. Thus, the four/five-period schema allows the writers to play with broad sweeps of time. But the pattern it offers is a way of addressing the present, constantly recalibrated, but always “now.”