At the start of the Proem to Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser compares the ‘state of present time’, as he has done previously in the poem, to ‘the image of the antique world’ (V.Proem.1.1–2). The abounding of sin among men, as we are to learn in the first canto of this book, has led Astræa, daughter of Jupiter and figure of justice, to abandon the world. In the Proem, Spenser – who cannot himself do such a thing (‘loath this state of life so tickle, | And loue of things so vaine to cast away’, VII.viii.1.6–7) – makes a similar complaint: ‘Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, | From the first point of his appointed sourse, | And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse’ (V.Proem.1.7–9). The trope of the world's decline from a golden age (taken from Book 1 of Ovid's Metamorphoses) leads to the depiction of a physical change in human subjects:

Ovid too says that people from the most recent age have taken the stony property of their time, although by referring immediately to this quality, and by alluding in the immediately subsequent lines to the myth of Pyrrha and Deucalion (whereas Ovid postpones this myth until lines 348–415), Spenser compresses the cosmological and human narratives, and makes mankind's physical transformation all the more explicitly part of the universal history.