tion of the agricultural with the natural life. A telling quotation from a modern his-
torian, Ernest Gellner, illustrates how instinctive this equation can still be:
“Agrarian man can be compared with a natural species which can survive in the
natural environment. Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced
or bred species which can no longer breathe effectively in the nature-given atmos-
phere, but can only function effectively and survive in a new, specially blended and
artificially sustained air or medium.”^117 Varro would have agreed with this obser-
vation (substituting “urban” for “industrial”);^118 but it would have shocked Virgil
and Seneca. The modern scholar has naturalized the agricultural state as being
indeed a natural one, but Virgil and Seneca are wiser in seeing that this phase
should be pushed one step farther back, since Gellner’s “agrarian man” is himself
already inextricably in the phase of estrangement from a natural environment.
A final key Senecan text to consider is Epistle90, in which Seneca grapples with
the Stoic problem of how close early man was to god and to nature, and how far
the progress of human civilization is the work of philosophers.^119 Seneca agrees
with his Stoic sources, in particular Posidonius, on many important points (4 – 6):
early humans lived in harmony with nature, under the natural leadership of the
wise men of the time, until the introduction of vice led to tyranny and the need for
law. But he dissents very strongly in the rest of the letter on the question of the
relationship of philosophy and technology, with far-reaching consequences for his
views on the timing and nature of the Fall. In comparison with Posidonius, for
whom those early wise men were philosophers who devised means of improving
the conditions of life, Seneca firmly denigrates the artes,and he regularly quotes
from the crucial Iron Age section of Virgil’s first Georgicas his master text on the
subject.^120 All the crafts that his Roman tradition marks as defining products of the
Iron Age — architecture, hunting, metallurgy, weaving, agriculture, baking (9 –
23) — these are things he strenuously wishes to exempt from the realm of the
philosopher.^121 The role of philosophy is not to discover these appurtenances of the
Iron Age, as his Greek tradition claimed, but to compensate for them.
Seneca waits carefully to play the trump card of the Roman Iron Age tradition,
the ship. In the Greek tradition from which he is working here, it is agriculturethat
is “the technological art par excellence”;^122 but for Seneca the ship must be the
emblem of technology. As he builds his case by listing the offending artes,a con-
noisseur of his work and of the Roman tradition will be waiting to hear about the
ship, so crucial to the Romans as the quintessential emblem of technology’s denat-
uralizing force. When Seneca comes to sum up, the ship is still left unmentioned:
“All these things... are the discoveries of a human being, not of a philosopher,”
Seneca’s Roman Iron Age. 129