four. Transitions from

Myth into History II

Ages of Gold and Iron

108

ACROSS THE DIVIDE

The last chapter closed with Nero singing as Rome burned, singing of the fall of
Troy, “making present evils look like disasters of the past” (praesentia mala uetustis
cladibus adsimulantem, Ann.15.39.3). The question of how “like” are the present
and the distant past is one that will preoccupy us in this chapter as well, and the fall
of Troy will once again be an important focus. We have seen repeatedly how
important the fall of Troy was as a mark in time. On the other side of that demar-
cation live the heroes, who converse with gods and lift rocks it would take twelve
men now to lift; on this side of the demarcation begins the movement into current
human history. In the previous chapter we saw that the movement into human his-
tory could be represented by the historiographical tradition as a movement into
an increasingly ascertainable realm of knowledge, with an increasing security of
chronological emplotment, and we saw how much could be at stake in denying or
asserting the associated categories of historicity and datability. In this chapter we
shall investigate the transition from myth into history from a rather different angle,
with a data bank made up mainly of poetic, rather than historiographical, texts. We
shall investigate the most important transition in myth, at once the most important
beginning and ending moment in myth — the transition from the Golden to the
Iron Age. This is a moment when the human race enters a historical space, not just
in terms of coming over a horizon of historically ascertainable time, but in larger