(1935) we have been familiar with the complex dialectic between primitivist and
progressive views of human history. The overtly pessimistic view of decline is
often accompanied by an admiring acknowledgment of the remarkable technolog-
ical and cultural achievements of human civilization; from this perspective, the
Golden Age is not idyllic bliss but sloth, or savagery.^30 In fact the concepts of
decline and of progress are inextricably linked, not only in the sense that all such
contradictory oppositional pairs depend on each other for mutual definition, but in
the larger sense that both progress and decline depend upon a cognate conception
of “the nature and meaning of time.”^31 Both templates ultimately depend upon a
dynamic conception of the movement of the society forwards in successive phases
through time, in which any “advance” is simultaneously open to being represented
as a sacrificial “loss” of what previously existed; further, this apprehension of
successive phases makes it always possible to envisage a recurrence, or return,
whether in a positive or negative sense.
Lucretius book 5 is a fine example of how these two competing yet inextricably
linked views of the human past can coexist very fruitfully in a single text; he creates
a vision of human experience as having been always already in progress, and always
already in decline.^32 Virgil’s conception, particularly in the Georgics,is in dialogue
with this Lucretian picture and is likewise closely related to the complex of ideas we
see in Varro.^33 Virgil presents a transition moment early in Georgics1 as Jupiter
marks the shift to the Iron Age, away from a preagricultural life of common plenty
toward the conditions of modernity, with the introduction of the arts of technology
that enable and enforce the life of toil: fire, sailing, navigation, hunting, animal
domestication, metallurgy, and plowing (1.122 – 49). The move from the pre-Jovian
to the Jovian state looks like a moment of fall, however compelling the appurte-
nances of civilization may appear, and the grim necessities of wresting a living from
a recalcitrant nature are given full treatment in the poem.^34 But the resulting life of
agricultural labor is one that the poem regularly appears to celebrate, most con-
spicuously at the end of book 2, where the life of contemporary farmers is wistfully
idealized as superior to the life of the city, so much so that it appears still prelapsar-
ian: among the farmers Justice left her last trace as she departed from the earth to
mark the onset of the Iron Age (2.458 – 74), and their current life preserves a living
remnant of a life once lived by Golden Saturn (513 – 40).^35 These and other contra-
dictory elements in the poem are variously read as self-consciously fractured or
else as ultimately susceptible to a unified reading, whether “optimistic” or “pessi-
mistic.” However individual readers may wish to choose on this score, it is impor-
tant to see Virgil working with a larger cultural template in which this kind of schiz-
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron