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Two poets, each writing from INSIDE the degraded age, each dating themselves against a lost golden age · and each betraying knowledge that the dark age is a corridor, not a terminus. The Purana states it outright (a seed-remnant carried across the boundary into the restored Krita age); Hesiod admits it in a single subjunctive ('or been born afterwards'). The interregnum is survivable and temporary in both, and both texts are themselves artifacts produced inside the gap they describe.
Hesiod counts the metallic ages and places himself inside the worst one · and treats it as an interval, not an ending: 'Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards' (ll. 174–175). 'Born afterwards' concedes there is an afterwards: something better on the far side of the iron age.
set against Vishnu Purana IV.24
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