even imagines calendars in operation at the epoch when gods still mingled with
humans, even though, as we saw above, the usual tradition had it that organized
time was not a feature of the pre-Iron ages, and that the Golden Age did not need
such accommodations in engaging with the divine.^104 Jupiter in person, says Catul-
lus, often saw sacrifice offered before his temple “when the annual rites had come
on the festival days” (annua cum festis uenissent sacra diebus,388). Here Catullus
reinforces how hard it is, from our current perspectives, to recover a time before
our implication in time.
If the urge to contemplate the instant of the Fall itself ends in a mirage, then the
urge to communicate with that lost state before the Fall turns out to be a mirage as
well. The poem embodies and evokes an excessof yearning (nimis optato... tem-
pore,22) for that lost past time, a piercing nostalgia that is conjured up by the glam-
orous and romantic atmosphere of so much of the poem.^105 Many other of
Catullus’s poems demonstrate the same obsession with a hiatus between the pres-
ent and a past that is now unreachable, just beyond his recoverable grasp.^106 His
“Peleus and Thetis” makes this obsession global.
SENECA’S ROMAN IRON AGE
Catullus’s main heir in the deployment of the ship as the agent of the Fall is Seneca,
above all in his Medea.In general, Seneca’s work shows a highly developed use of
the Golden/Iron Age matrix to focus on the ensnarements of human technology
and denaturalization.^107 As a Stoic, he brings a new battery of preoccupations to the
issues, for he is intrigued by the intractability of following the Stoic injunction to
“live in agreement with nature” (oJmologoumevnw" th'/ fuvsei zh'n) now that humans
have, according to the template we have been investigating, irrevocably left the
natural state behind.^108
In his Medea,Seneca focuses, like Catullus and Horace, on the vital moment of
rupture represented by the sailing of the first ship, when humans left the state of
nature and entered the definitively human state. He does not involve himself in
Catullus’s eddying temporal confusions but concentrates obsessively on the di-
vorce between humans and nature as actualized through the ship’s embodiment of
transgressive technology.^109 The sailing of the Argo is emblematic of human
beings’ attempt to press the natural world into service, violating ordered patterns
in order to try to impose their own patterns, as part of “civilization’s paradoxical
dislocation of the world to produce order.”^110 A brilliant moment in the Medea’s
second choral ode encapsulates this perspective and represents a true leap of imag-
Seneca’s Roman Iron Age. 127