out to and grasp. Calpurnius Siculus, writing in an age even more fallen than
Nero’s, has given a cruel extra twist to this apprehension of nostalgia, which here
becomes a kind of metanostalgia. In his postdated bucolics we may see not simply
a nostalgia for a lost mythical Golden Age, but a nostalgia for a lost historical age
in which you could still feel a nostalgia for a lost mythical Golden Age.
An Unbridgeable Divide. 137