had spent a lot of his career discoursing on the moral problems of gold in its lit-
eral, physical sense, and it is perhaps no surprise that he did not find it attractive to
shift gear into endorsing the value of gold, even if it was warped towards a
metaphorical register.^144
METAPHOR OR BULLION?
Readers of the Aeneidmay well remark that Virgil is himself already one step
ahead of Horace, for it is possible to detect a typical Virgilian equivocation over
goldenness built into the Aeneidin advance. The qualifications that Virgil intro-
duces are not so much in Anchises’ prophecy itself, but two books later, when
Virgil shows us Aeneas on the future site of Rome in book 8, being led to the hum-
ble home of Evander. Evander informs his guest of the “first” Golden Age in
Latium under Saturn, in language that should remind Aeneas, and certainly re-
minds the reader, of Anchises’ earlier prophecy of Augustus’s refounding of the
Golden Age of Saturn: aurea quae perhibent illo sub rege fuere/saecula(“Under that
king were the ages that they call golden,” 324 – 25). This metaphorical goldenness
is already being undone two lines later in Evander’s history lesson, when he says
that the next, “off-color,” age (decolor aetas) brought in “love of possession”
(amor... habendi,326 – 27).^145 But the real cap to Evander’s words comes twenty
lines later, when the pair pass the Capitoline hill, described by the poet as “golden
now, but at a remote point in time bristling with woody thickets” (aurea nunc, olim
siluestribus horrida dumis,348). The contemporary Age of Gold is marked by the
physical material, blazing forth from the golden roof of the Capitoline temple of
Jupiter, and it is inevitable that we ask how, and whether, the moral values of
Saturn’s metaphorical gold can be left unthreatened by the modern world ’s phys-
ical gold. The chronological disjunction between Evander’s Rome and Augustus’s,
over a thousand years later, opens up a potential disjunction in values, captured in
the two-edged references of “golden.”^146 The opposed chronological and symbolic
poles define each other: the more splendid the physical goldenness of the modern
city, the more keenly the contrast with the time of origins is felt, and the more cre-
ative effort is poured into covering over, or prising open, the fissures.^147
Ovid, predictably, is more interested in the prising open, and he plays up the
tension between the literal and metaphorical reference of “gold” with great zest.^148
As so often, what look like finely discriminated nuances in Virgil look like shabby
equivocations once Ovid has gone to work on them. For the modern Ovidian
lover, the splendid wealth of Rome guarantees its sophistication, and the former
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron