ascent from Iron to Gold by representing a movement “downwards.” The repeti-
tion backwards of this progression through time involves Virgil in a repetition of
Catullus 64. In lines 34 – 35 we see Catullus’s poem beginning again, for a second
time: alter erit tum Tiphys et altera quae uehat Argo/delectos heroas(“There will then
be a second Tiphys, and a second Argo to carry the picked heroes”); in lines 35 –
36 we see the same consequences of this sailing as in Catullus, with second wars
and with great Achilles being dispatched to Troy again (erunt etiam altera
bella/atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles). The chronological and eth-
ical puzzles of the Catullan model are rerun with this new, second, beginning. Just
as in Catullus the heroes occupy a middle ground between glamor and grubbiness,
and between innocence and the Fall, eddying in their chronological and moral
no-man’s-land, so too in Virgil the second Argo and second Trojan War are a
chronological and moral interruption, disturbing the apparent trajectory of the
poem’s attempt to regain the lost time before time. Virgil also picks up on Catul-
lus’s collapsing of certainties of time at the pivotal moment of transition. Virgil’s
poem creates great difficulties for readers in trying to assess when the new Golden
Age is actually beginning (now? — after the second heroic age?);^133 this dilemma
reactivates the Catullan problem of when the Golden Age actually ended. Virgil’s
whole poem, in sum, depends intimately on Catullus 64, especially in its develop-
ment of Catullus’s sense of desire to recapture a lost state. Catullus had mobilized
nostalgia in order to construct a “longing for a return”;^134 Virgil is accentuating
that feeling of nostalgia by showing how his own longing for a return has to be
mediated through Catullus’s.
The fourth Eclogueillustrates vividly the special appeal such models have at
times of crisis and instability between eras, as they respond to the threatened col-
lapse of social order with the attempt to conjure up a “deep legitimacy.”^135 A sim-
ilarly escapist response to the same social crisis is to be found in Horace ’s Epode
16, where the dream of an escape to the “Blessed Isles” in the far West is the geo-
graphical correlative of Virgil’s chronological regression. Horace ’s vision, how-
ever, is far bleaker than Virgil’s. He responds to Virgil’s supposed Sibylline
prophecy of release by alluding to another Sibylline prophecy in which Rome ’s
destruction is foretold.^136 Horace ’s first line “corrects” Virgil’s proclamation of the
“lastage” (ultima... aetas,4). “No, not the last age” is the implication of Horace ’s
opening — instead, “A second/otherage is being worn away by civil war” (Altera
iam teritur bellis ciuilibus aetas).^137 Virgil’s language of repetition (alter Tiphys,
altera Argo, altera bella), intended to be a looping back with a trajectory to a point
beyond war, is turned back on him by Horace, so that the repetitions are now
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron