letter so far: non enim dat natura uirtutem: ars est bonum fieri(“For nature doesn’t
just givevirtue; it is an artto become a good man,” 44). The decline into civiliza-
tion is regularly regarded ambivalently by our authors, who after all would not
have been exercising their prized skills in prose or verse without it. Seneca seizes
the opportunity to take the paradox as far as possible, since he removes the
supreme good of philosophy from the natural state and converts it into the ultimate
art, the only one of value that the degradation of civilization has to offer.
RETURNING TO THE GOLDEN AGE
Seneca did not just write about the Golden Age; he lived through one, in the form
of the emperor Nero’s reborn Golden Age, which was itself a return to Augustus’s
return to a Golden Age. Although Nero’s and Augustus’s returning Golden Ages
are the best known, many such ages are documented under the Empire.^127 The fre-
quent recycling of this ideology throughout the imperial period is itself ironic
commentary both on the repetitive periodicity that is potentially part of the con-
cept of return and also on the inherent tendency of patterns of imperial power and
succession to repeat themselves.^128 The idea of a return is partly enabled by the
profound shift in emphasis that comes with the change from the Greek concept of
a Golden “Race” (gevno") to the Roman one of an “Age” (aetas, saeculum).^129 A
qualitatively different “race” is gone forever, even if it may be hearkened back to
as a point of comparison, but an “age” is easier to imagine returning, or being
returned to, especially once a distinctive sense of imperial history has solidified,
with its own periodizations.^130
We are so accustomed to this aspect of the Golden Age ideology that it can be a
surprise to learn how long it took to be first deployed. Although there are earlier
examples of life in particular periods being compared to life under Cronus, the first
text to speak of an actual return to the Age of Gold is Virgil’s fourthEclogue.^131
Here Virgil expresses the fantasy that the rupture in human experience can be
repaired, so that an Age of Saturn will return (6): humans and gods will mingle
together once more (15 – 16); eventually the emblematic machine of the Iron Age,
the ship, will disappear (38 – 39); the agricultural technology of the Iron Age will
likewise disappear as the earth returns to its former spontaneous bounty (39 – 41).
Before this Saturnian Age can be reached again, however, the process of rolling
back the lapse of time since the Fall will involve rerunning the heroic age as well
(31 – 36).^132 In Hesiod ’s scheme the heroes complicate the descent from Gold to
Iron by representing a movement “upwards”; in Virgil’s, the heroes complicate the
Returning to the Golden Age. 131