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Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have recognized a progression through the life course, from infancy through old age. The overall progression appears universal, yet the time between birth and death has been organized in distinctive ways by different societies (Boyle & Morriss, 1987). The simplest division was into two stages: childhood and adulthood. But as societies become more complex and as longevity increases, they tend to develop a greater number of life stages.

Greek and Roman ideas were influential in shaping how we think today about aging and the life course. One of the greatest Greek tragedies is the three-part Oedipus cycle, the last play written when its author, Sophocles, was nearly 90 years old. In this story, Oedipus becomes king because he solves the famous riddle of the Sphinx: “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the afternoon?” The answer is the human being at successive life stages: infancy (crawling on four legs), adulthood (walking on two), and old age (using a cane, a third leg, to support the other two). The Greek medical writer Hippocrates described four stages of life, or ages, corresponding to the four seasons of the year. Similar ideas were put forward by the Roman physician Galen and by the astronomer Ptolemy. Ptolemy developed an idea of seven stages of life, which had great influence during the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages, Christian civilization balanced the image of multiple stages with the metaphor of life as a journey or spiritual pilgrimage. From that standpoint, no single stage of life would be viewed as superior to another. Just as the natural life cycle was oriented by the recurrent cycle of the seasons, so the individual soul would be oriented toward the hope of an afterlife (Burrows, 1986). The human life course as both cycle and journey was thereby endowed with transcendent meaning and wholeness (Cole, 1992).

With the coming of the Reformation and the Renaissance, ideas about the life course changed into forms we recognize as modern. Writing in this epoch, Shakespeare expressed the traditional idea of the “Seven Ages of Man”:

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players,

They have their exits and entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

(As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7)

To Shakespeare, the periods of life were merely roles acted out on the stage of society, and the role losses of old age appeared as the final act of the play. Thus, a theatrical metaphor replaced the ideal of a cosmic cycle or a spiritual journey.

At the dawn of modern times, a generation after Shakespeare, drawings and engravings began to depict the stages of life in a new way. The traditional image of a completed circle became an image of a rising and falling staircase, where midlife occupied the peak of power. That image promoted the idea of life as a “career,” in which individuals could exercise control over later life through, for example, extended education, good health care, and capital accumulated through savings during earlier stages.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the stages of life began to be demarcated in ways we recognize today. Childhood became a period of life in its own right, separate from adulthood and old age (Aries, 1962). By the 20^th century, as the practice of retirement became well established, old age became a distinct phase as well. Some sociologists argue that such stages reflect patterns of socialization tied to dominant institutions such as the school or workplace (Dannefer, 1984; Kohli, 2007); in other words, retirement exists as a separate phase of life partly because society needs to make way in the workplace for younger workers.

Today, a person will spend, on average, at least one fourth or even one third of adulthood in retirement (Kohli, 1987). Partly as a consequence, distinctions are made between the young-old (ages 65–74), the old-old (ages 75–84), and now the oldest-old (ages 85 and over). Demarcating a stage of life following the working years is more important to us than ever, yet we have simultaneously become less certain about what it means to grow older or to “act your age” at any point in life. Issues around the potential for new forms of self-expression and contributions to society in later life are discussed later in this book.