beginning of history takes the gods away from mating with mortals, the gods are
stuck in a timeless zone, one that throws into relief by contrast the new entrapment
of humans in time.^49 After the chronological divorce between humans and gods, it
is now only human narratives that go on, forward-moving, deriving meaning from
death: the gods, without death and without progeny, are by comparison fixed in an
undynamic temporal zone. To be in human history is to be in narrative, and the
only way out of this forward progression is through death; as we shall see repeat-
edly, it is not possible to arrest the flow of this narrative time or to swim back up
against its current. As for their relations with the gods, in the Iron Age humans can
only struggle to accommodate the timelessness of the gods into their mundane
civic time frames, by means of their annually repeating festival calendars, just as
they struggle to accommodate the gods’ lack of physical presence by means of
fixed temples and statues.^50
AN INSTANT OF RUPTURE
The Trojan War, then, is a key marker of a transition from a period of myth to a
period of history, as the first beginning of scientific historical chronology, and as
the moment of passage from a more blessed time of heroes and gods to the con-
tinuous time of history. Yet Troy is only one of a number of possible moments of
rupture, many of which share the same property of instantaneous demarcation
between before and after. It is significant that the transition from a previous idyl-
lic state is so often configured as an instant in time, in which the idyllic life is some-
how lost in a single moment of catastrophe, with one bite of the apple.^51 This con-
cept is one favored especially in the poetic tradition, and less marked in other
discourses. Instead of a gradual shift of the kind we see in Tacitus — even one
punctuated by significant moments of transition — the Roman poetic tradition
loves to concentrate on a single moment. As we shall see, the possibility of focus-
ing on that single moment can be called into question, but its allure persists. One
moment in particular commands attention, from a generation before the Trojan
War. This is the sailing of the first ship, regularly identified as the Argo, carrying
the Argonauts to the edge of the world to collect the golden fleece.
The Roman interest in the first ship is very striking, as is the fondness for cast-
ing the Argo in this role. It is well known that in Euripides’ Medeaor Apollonius’s
Argonauticathere is no real interest in the idea that the Argo is the first ship.^52 If you
forced a Greek to name the first ship he would probably tell you it was the ship in
which Danaus sailed from Egypt to Argos, but in general the question offirst sail-
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron