- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron
ning or an end; as Fitzgerald well puts it, “the voyage of the Argo is both the
moment of supreme cooperation and mingling between gods and mortals and the
beginning of their separation.”^61
Again, this cluster of concerns is far to seek in the Greek sources. The distinc-
tiveness of the Roman interest in the sailing of the first ship is very striking and
deserves a brief discussion before we return to Catullus’s Argo, and to the pres-
sures the first ship puts upon the structures of time.
THE CORRUPTING SEA
The Romans are not simply more interested than the Greeks in the sailing of the
first ship as a dramatic focus;^62 they also show a far greater interest in the wicked
ship as a token of a divorce from a state of nature.^63 Hesiod expresses a landlub-
ber’s suspicion of sailing (Op.618 – 94), and he claims that in a just society people
get enough from the land without needing to sail (236 – 37)^64 — this is as close as he
comes to moral condemnation of sailing, or to the concept that the Golden Age
was free of seafaring. The Greeks were certainly impressed by the ship as an
emblem of technology, as well they might be, considering that until the eighteenth
century, with the invention of the industrial steam engine, the ocean-going ship
was the largest and most complex and powerful single machine that human beings
could make. Accordingly, when Odysseus and his men vindicate human crafty
intelligence by blinding the Cyclops, the first simile describing their action com-
pares them to a team of men making a ship (Od.9.383 – 88).^65 In the famous ode in
Sophocles’ Antigoneabout the extraordinary nature of human beings, seafaring is
the first example of their phenomenal and disquieting resourcefulness — and plow-
ing is the second (332 – 41).^66 More strongly yet, Solon and Euripides relate the
restless urge to sail the sea for profit to a morally dubious drive, one bordering on
infatuation (a[th).^67
To the Romans, however, the ship was always liable to be more than an emblem,
however morally unsettling, of human audaciousness and technology. The ship
was cast in the far more sinister role of embodying an estrangement from a natu-
ral state, since the ship enables humans to transcend, or rather violate, natural
boundaries, as it goes in search of loot, trade, and empire. For the Romans, more
truly than for the Greeks, “the Golden Age ended with the opening up of the
Corrupting Sea.”^68 The Greeks might happily think of themselves as living around
the sea like ants or frogs living around a pond,^69 but the Romans idealized the land-