(omnia ista... hominis... non sapientis inuenta sunt,24), he says — at which point
he does at last produce his swerve into the long-awaited topic, with “just as the
ships with which we cross rivers and seas” (tam mehercules quam nauigia quibus
amnes quibusque maria transimus).^123 The ship inserts itself irresistibly, and it may
be that it is indeed an addition to the list of land-based artestreated by Posidonius,
to which Seneca has been responding so far.
However that may be, the whole attitude toward technology and toward the
cause of the Fall from the primal state is profoundly different in Seneca from what
he will have read in Posidonius. If we hold Seneca’s letter up against what can be
reconstructed of his Greek model, the cultural power of the Roman template we
have been investigating emerges very clearly. In Posidonius, the original state of
humans may well not have been described as a “Golden Age” at all, while it very
clearly is in Seneca (illo... saeculo quod aureum perhibent,5; cf. fortunata tempora,
36).^124 Further, in Posidonius it was not the introduction of the artesof technology
that tipped human life toward decline, because in his scheme that stage came later,
with tyrannies and law, while it was the first philosophers who oversaw the intro-
duction ofartes;^125 in Seneca, as befits a student of Catullus, Horace, and Virgil, the
artesare themselves the tipping point, irrevocably pitching humans into the fallen
state. Where Posidonius projects an early time ruled over by philosophers who
introduce useful technological innovations until moral decay sets in with devel-
oped societies and their apparatus of law, Seneca follows his Roman predecessors
in having a Golden Age that is lost with the advent of the morally flawed technol-
ogy that enabled humans to dominate nature — or deluded them into thinking that
they could.
At the end of the letter, Seneca introduces his own distinctively paradoxical
twist on the complexities of interlinked decline and progress that we have observed
as part of the Golden and Iron Age model throughout. For Seneca, philosophy is
not an original condition, as Posidonius claimed. Those natural leaders and wise
men in the earliest days, high-minded and close to divinity as they may have been,
were not true wise men, in the sense of being philosophers, as Posidonius had it
(44; cf. 35 – 36). Rather, for Seneca, philosophy is the product of civilization, a nec-
essary remedy for our fallen state. For someone who relishes philosophy as much
as Seneca does, this brings him very close to a kind of fortunate fall position, since
without the fall into the Iron Age, we would not have had the art of philosophy at
all.^126 The natural goodness of a primal natural state has no appeal for Seneca, for
it involves no knowledge, no choice, and no struggle (44 – 46). He sharpens the
paradox by rehabilitating the crucial word that has attracted so much scorn in the
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron