merely repeated, with cycles of civil war, instead of potentially glamorous Trojan
wars, cycles that can never escape from their circularity.
The idea of the Golden Age is particularly associated with the Age of Augustus,
and Augustus’s promotion of a new Golden Age is the subject of numerous stud-
ies.^138 As often with studies of ideology, work on the Augustan Golden Age can
create the impression of a very homogeneous system; especially in the fundamen-
tal work of Zanker (1988) the reader is introduced to a uniform programme, one
reflected with little variation in the poems of Horace and Virgil and in the build-
ings and iconography of Augustus himself. Such an impression of uniformity does
not do justice to what was “a highly differentiated concept.”^139 In particular, the
division we have already noted between Virgil and Horace carries on past the tri-
umviral years, and one of the points on which they differ is precisely that of the
possibility or desirability of a returning Age of Gold.^140 As Barker (1996) well
argues, Virgil’s conception of a returning Golden Age is distinctly idiosyncratic,
and not just a reflection of a homogeneous ideology; as Barker further demon-
strates, Horace continues to have serious misgivings about this Virgilian concep-
tion and is intent on correcting it in his later poetry, especially in the Carmen
Saeculareof 17 b.c.e.
The Carmen’s performance at the Ludi Saeculares comes less than two years
after Virgil’s death and the posthumous publication of the Aeneid.In the sixth book
of the epic, Horace and his peers will have read Anchises prophesying to his son
Aeneas in the underworld that Augustus would “again found the golden ages in
Latium, through the fields once ruled by Saturn” (aurea condet/saecula qui rursus
Latio regnata per arua/Saturno quondam, Aen.6.792 – 94). These words appear to
be doing more than announcing a general conception of the return ofaurea sae-
cula,since planning for the Ludi Saeculares will have been already well under way
before Virgil’s death at the age of only fifty on 21 September 19 b.c.e.^141 Especially
if we take note of the language Anchises uses at the end of this speech, where he
speaks to his son in words translated from the Sibylline oracle that laid out the for-
mula for the rituals of the Ludi, it looks to me as if Anchises’ speech was written
by a man with a commission: if Virgil had lived, he would have composed the
Carmen Saeculare.^142 However that may be, and whatever Virgil might have writ-
ten if he had been the one to compose the Carmen,there is no doubt that Horace ’s
Carmen,despite its many debts to the Aeneid,refrains from endorsing the fantas-
tic and mystical Virgilian conceptions of a returning Age of Gold.^143 Horace ’s deep
misgivings about the moral associations of gold have a great deal to do with his
reluctance to endorse Virgil’s returning Age of Gold. As Barker argues, Horace
Returning to the Golden Age. 133