sions, as a life lacking all the defining characteristics of normal human life. In
Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen,the standard modern work
on ancient conceptions of the Golden Age, Gatz collects in an index passages that
deal with absentiaof various things in the Golden Age.^39 It is quite a list: “absence
of ships, war, private property, disease, slaves” (absentia navium, belli, rerum priva-
tarum, morbi, servorum). We could add more “absences” to the list from other
sources: fire, metallurgy, weaving, plowing, marriage, law, government, cities.^40 If
we place such a list of absences beside Lucretius’s snapshot list of the features of
modern civilization (nauigia atque agri culturas moenia leges/arma uias uestis et cetera
de genere horum,“ships and agriculture, walls, laws, weapons, land travel, woven
clothing, etc. etc.,” 5.1448 – 49), then it becomes plain that the fundamental point of
these myths has endured through their transference to Rome or to the modern
world. Now, as then, such myths bring “our” own current condition into focus by
holding up as a counterexample a set of ideas embodying what “we” are not.^41
For our present purposes, the crucial “absence” that is absent from Gatz’s list is
“time” — both ordered civic time and progressive historical time. As Prometheus
says in his tragedy, before his invention of the necessities of civilization (numbers,
writing, animal domestication, and sailing, 459 – 68), humans had no way of mark-
ing the progress of time ( [Aesch.] PV454 – 58):
h\n dÆ oujde;n aujtoi'" ou[te ceivmato" tevkmar
ou[tÆ ajnqemwvdou" h\ro" ou[te karpivmou
qevrou" bevbaion, ajllÆ a[ter gnwvmh" to; pa'n
e[prasson, e[ste dhv sfin ajntola;" ejgw;
a[strwn e[deixa tav" te duskrivtou" duvsei".
They had no secure demarcation either of winter or offlowery spring or
of fruit-bearing summer, but they acted completely without judgment, until
I showed them the risings of the stars and their settings, indistinguishable
[before].^42In Lucretius’s portrayal of the development of human civilization, the invention
of the calendar (5.1436 – 39) comes at the crucial turning point just before the
fortification of cities, the division of land for agriculture, sailing for trade in pre-
cious goods, developed political alliances, and poetry and writing (1440 – 45).^43
One of Plautus’s characters, from his lost Boeotia,illustrates the pivotal impor-
tance of time marking with brilliant clarity, showing how constructions of time are
determinative for the wretched modern condition. A starving parasite grumbles
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron