Seems like a metaphor for a lot of things.

Are we the Greek vase painters?

After the palaces had fallen, vase-painters went on for a couple of generations reproducing, without much conviction, imitations of the style to which men were accustomed,” A.R. Burn tells us:

This is the length of time it usually takes for a people, after a far-reaching social change, to get habits which are no longer relevant thoroughly out of their system; for the first generation of survivors are still people brought up under the old order, and the second generation are people brought up by people who were brought up under the old order. This is one reason why a century, a period of about three generations, so often seems to have a distinctive character. In the third generation, vase-painters at Athens and perhaps elsewhere had at last lost the feeling that the decadent sub-Mycenaean was in some way the “right” style, and a fresh start is made with proto-geometric, the folk art of a vigorous and talented people.