ophrenia on the subject of progress and decline is radical. A Roman sense of accel-
erating departure from a revered and simpler national past into an unmanageably
complex present is blended with a philosophical and poetic tradition that sees con-
temporary life as a condition of estrangement from a natural state, and these com-
bined themes are always liable to be in competition with an apprehension of tri-
umphalist forward movement toward greater control of the natural and political
world. Similar issues present themselves in the Aeneid’s representation of Italy,
which blends a “hard primitivism” model of progress from savagery toward civi-
lization with a “soft primitivism” model of decline from a natural state toward
decadence, while adding in a cyclical pattern of recurrence.^36
Even Tacitus is by no means fully committed to a global view of decline (in part,
perhaps, as a function of sheer Tacitean perversity in refusing to commit himself
to a global view of anything). It is not at all the case that he presents the contem-
porary Roman world as universally inferior to the past. In Annals3, some fourteen
pages after the passage we have already noted on the growth of law as a result of
progressive decline from a state of nature, he has another passage on the move-
ment of societal norms, in which he discusses the waxing and waning of personal
luxury at Rome (3.55). In accordance with the familiar model, an improvement in
this respect inside the city is the result of the arrival of new senators from outside
the city. These new senators represent a kind of return to the past, bringing with
them attitudes that have persisted in the different time groove of the Italian towns,
the colonies, and the provinces. Vespasian symbolizes the phenomenon, and his
personal lifestyle is marked as antiquus.Tacitus further speculates that the change
in habits might be part of a “cyclical pattern to all human affairs, so that as the
changing seasons come around again, so do fashions in customs” (nisi forte rebus
cunctis inest quidam uelut orbis, ut quem ad modum temporum uices ita morum uertan-
tur,3.55.5).^37 Since the new senators themselves represent a fragment of the past
returning to the city, Tacitus’s two explanations for an improvement in Roman
attitudes toward luxury are not as opposed as they have sometimes been taken to
be. The concept of a return is inextricably part of the construction of a nostalgia
for the past, as we shall see throughout.
TIME BEFORE THE FALL
One key Roman text after another deals with what is now no longer a concept of a
Golden Race,but of a Golden Age.^38 This time when human beings lived the simple
life, in a state of nature, before the Fall, is often described through a series of omis-
Time before the Fall. 115