was to explain the present state of humanity, for the Augustans its function is to put
the emperor at the centre of the scheme of things.”^20 General historiographical
conceptions are also informed by the concept of a lost early state of freedom and
happiness. A prominent example is the account Tacitus gives in Annals3 of the
burgeoning of law that accompanies humans’ decline from their pristine state of
innocence. He presents a sequential picture, with successive phases of corruption
and legislation going hand in hand.^21 A similar view informs the picture of the
human past given by Varro, in his De Re Rustica(2.1.3 – 5). Here Varro is indebted
to the work of Dicaearchus, one of the comparatively few Greek thinkers to pay
serious attention to the paradigm.^22 Sometime around 300 b.c.e.Dicaearchus
wrote a “biography of Greece,” the Bios Hellados,in which he charted human
falling-offfrom an initial state of harmony with nature, a rationalized Golden Age
of self-sufficient contentment rather than of fantastic plenty, down to pastoralism
(a kind of hunter-gatherer existence), and finally into agriculturalism.^23 Varro
believes that he can date the onset of the last stage of progressive decline, because
it is — significantly — linked to the founding of the first city in the Greek world,
Thebes, 2,100 years before his time (3.1.2).^24 He further believes that even the last
stage of life in the agricultural phase is better than life in the city: neque solum
antiquior cultura agri, sed etiam melior(“Field cultivation is not only more ancient,
but even superior,” 3.1.4).^25
It is striking that Varro’s strong preference for rural over urban life appears to
have no precedent in his Dicaearchan model.^26 With Varro’s departure here from
Dicaearchus we see a typical example of the crucial part that rural nostalgia plays
in Roman thought, as the Romans digest their supposed estrangement from rural
life and their incorporation into the modern alienations of urbanism. This is an
attitude that easily accommodates itself to the view we noted earlier, in which the
supposedly simple life of noncivilized contemporaries is a remnant of an earlier life
now lost to “us”; the city, representing modernity and history, is in a different
groove of time from the country, which is still somehow in touch with a more sim-
ple and virtuous past.^27 As Raymond Williams has shown in his study of the con-
cepts of “country” and “city” in modern England, such templates have been phe-
nomenally persistent in their appeal.^28
The example of Varro highlights the complexity and ambivalence of such views
of decline, for he follows Dicaearchus in seeing agriculturalism as the last phase of
falling-offfrom an original state of nature, but he expounds the point in a work
whose main purpose is to celebrate agriculture in Italy as a balance against con-
temporary corruption.^29 In particular, ever since the work of Lovejoy and Boas
From Bliss to Misery. 113