state was one for bumpkins: simplicitas rudis ante fuit; nunc aurea Roma est
(“Uncultured simplicity existed formerly; now there is golden Rome,” Ars Am.
3.112; cf. 2.277 – 78: aurea sunt uere nunc saecula: plurimus auro/uenit honos: auro
conciliatur amor,“Now truly are the ages of gold; the greatest number of honors
are sold for gold; by gold is love procured”). Twin-headed Janus, who has seen
both Golden Ages, of Saturn and of Augustus, is able to give Ovid valuable two-
sided information in the Fasti.When Ovid asks him why he is given coins as well
as honey on his feast day, Janus laughingly remarks that Ovid has been taken in by
the ideologies of the current age if he thinks that honey is sweeter than cash (risit
et “o quam te fallunt tua saecula” dixit,/“qui stipe mel sumpta dulcius esse putas!”
Fast.1.191 – 92). When Saturn was reigning, says Janus, he hardly saw a single per-
son who was not fond of profit (193 – 94).^149 Janus agrees that the “love of posses-
sion” has grown (amor... habendi,195, quoting Aen.8.327), and gold has now
ousted the old bronze (221), but there never was a time when the literal presence
of money was not felt.^150 The gods like golden temples, however much they speak
up for the old ones (223 – 24).^151 As the god who can see both sides of everything,
Janus concludes, laudamus ueteres, sed nostris utimur annis;/mos tamen est aeque
dignus uterque coli(“We praise the old days, but our own are the ones we live in;
still, each custom is equally worth maintaining,” 225 – 26).^152 Crucially, as Barchiesi
remarks, there is no word in any of these Ovidian passages of the myth of an
Augustan returnto an Age of Gold;^153 instead, Ovid ’s Augustus is firmly associated
with the Age of Iron, and with its presiding deity of Jupiter.^154
Seneca likewise delivers himself of some mordant reflections on the degrading
literalization of the metaphorical apparatus of the Golden Age, together with its
new Neronian instantiation as an age of the golden Sun.^155 He draws on Ovid ’s pic-
ture of the golden palace and chariot of the Sun in order to shed oblique scorn on
Nero’s building projects, chariot racing, and glorification of the Sun;^156 he sums up,
“Finally, the age they want to look the best they call ‘Golden’ ” (denique quod op-
timum uideri uolunt saeculum aureum appellant, Ep.115.13). As Champlin well
remarks, “This passage shows startlingly open contempt for the new Golden
Age.... The concept of a new Golden Age is turned upside down, not sublime but
ignoble.”^157
The most savage comment on the pretentious hypocrisies that always threaten
to topple the whole ideology comes from Tacitus, in his account of Nero’s reign.
He seizes on an opportunity to work with the friction between the various associ-
ations of gold when he opens Annals16. Here he recounts the mania of a deluded
Carthaginian, one Caesellius Bassus, who had a dream revealing to him the pres-
Metaphor or Bullion?. 135