- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron
ence on his property of a vast cave stuffed with bullion (16.1.1). In accordance with
his usual strategy of associating Nero with the spurious allure of the Virgilian
myths, Tacitus makes this crackpot a second Dido, for she too had a significant
dream about treasure in the earth, and it is supposedly her trove that lies beneath
Bassus’s land.^158 Nero’s dream of a new Golden Age is wickedly made literal with
this vision of physical hunks of unworked bullion lying underground, and the
impossibility of Nero’s fantasies is made real when Bassus’s fantasies are dispelled.
The absurdity of the yearning to return to the Golden Age of myth is further
underlined with Tacitus’s mocking report of how the bards and orators at Nero’s
quinquennial games latch on to the treasure hunt to make topical their references
to the hackneyed themes of the Golden Age (16.2.4). The language of fruitfulness
that usually allows goldenness a metaphorical reference is now grotesquely con-
cretized, since these flatterers are talking of the earth bringing forth literal lumps
of gold.^159
AN UNBRIDGEABLE DIVIDE
An author who is often cited as evidence for Nero’s renewed Golden Age is
Calpurnius Siculus, a pastoral poet whose bucolics regularly allude to leitmotifs of
the Neronian renaissance. His status as contemporary evidence, however, has been
the subject of animated discussion since Champlin (1978) revived the formerly
accepted but long abandoned view that Calpurnius belonged in the third century
c.e.and not in the time of Nero. The weight of authority would now appear to be
against a Neronian date;^160 pending further developments in the debate, and provi-
sionally accepting Calpurnius as post-Neronian, we are left with the question of
why someone in a later period would want to return to the Neronian era in this
way, apparently going to considerable lengths to create the impression of a dra-
matic date in Nero’s reign. The bizarre appeal of Nero’s posthumous reputation
must play some part, for rumors of his return swept the Eastern empire at periodic
intervals.^161 Yet the strange nature of the yearning for a Golden Age acquires a new
perspective if Calpurnius Siculus is indeed recreating such an atmosphere many
years after Nero’s death. This belated poet, whoever, and whenever, he was,
appears to have penetrated to the heart of the whole ideology. He has intuited that
at the core of these evocations of a Golden Age is the agony of nostalgia, the
knowledge that the Golden Age is irretrievably lost and was — as Catullus in par-
ticular suggests — perhaps never something that human beings could reach a hand