In Works and Days Hesiod outlines the successive Ages of Man. His description of the current times, the Iron Age, includes a doom and gloom prediction of the destruction of mankind at the hands of Zeus1:
And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth.
Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days
I'm trying to gauge the significance of this doomsday prophecy, within the wider framework of Greek mythology. Is Hesiod's version of the endtimes mentioned elsewhere? Were later authors influenced by it, and did they build upon it? Was Zeus thought of as the eventual destructor of humanity?
1 The poet explicitly mentions that Zeus also had a hand in ending the second generation of men, for they had grown arrogant and ignored their sacred obligations to the gods. The first, third and fourth generations apparently died out without divine intervention.