ination, as Seneca attempts the impossible task of projecting oneself back into the
period before the Iron Age of sailing and agriculture: nondum quisquam sidera
norat,/stellisque quibus pingitur aether,/non erat usus(“Not yet did anyone know
the constellations, and there was no use made of the stars with which the aether is
painted,” 309 – 11).^111 The night sky is “painted” with stars, but then this painted
panorama was not an object of use, but only the opportunity for aesthetic contem-
plation; the individual stars (stellae)remained individual and were not arranged
into constellations (sidera).^112 What, then, did the night sky look like in the Golden
Age, when it was not pressed into time-marking service and its dots were as yet
unconnected by navigators or farmers? What did the constellation of the Plow
look like before there were any plows?
The radically paradoxical status of humans, in nature but not of it, receives sus-
tained attention in the Phaedra,which becomes a meditation on the Iron Age con-
dition, and the impossibility of escape from it.^113 Hippolytus believes that he can
live according to nature by living in nature, as men did in the Golden Age (483 –
564), yet the futility of his dream has been exposed already in the first scene (1 –
84), where his irruption into the natural scene with his hunt shows that even in his
supposedly edenic life in the woods he is still inescapably a modern human — inva-
sive, destructive, cataloguing, dominating, artful, and technological.^114 After all,
hunting is one of the artesthat mark the fall into the Iron Age in Virgil’s Georgics
(1.139 – 40). The nurse ’s address to Hippolytus (435 – 82), urging him to follow the
“natural” life for humans by living in the city, is richly ironic on many levels, espe-
cially when she totally misjudges her listener by using sustained metaphors from
agriculture and arboriculture (454 – 60); yet her whole speech exposes the way in
which the apparent naturalness of modern life is taken for granted by almost
everyone.^115 The nurse ’s complacency and Hippolytus’s delusion together provide
the parameters for exploring what it could mean in the contemporary world to
enact the Stoic tenet of living in agreement with nature.
In the end, the play offers no answer to the problem of what is natural for
humans, except to claim that it is natural, inevitable, for humans to be out of place
in nature, as the only animals to have perverted sex, animal domestication, and
agriculture.^116 We cannot, according to the play’s argument, extricate ourselves
from the estranging matrix of civilization, history, and technology. Hippolytus
thinks he can, by living a one-man Golden Age, but this is impossible — not just
because it is utopian, but because he cannot remove himself from the river of time
or swim back up against its current. Together with its master intertext, Virgil’s
Georgics,the play goes disconcertingly deep in its stripping away of the usual equa-
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron