As Stephen Hinds points out to me, Ovid is alert to these paradoxes in his
account of the ages: the Ovidian iron race start mining, and they dig up “harmful iron,
and — more harmful than iron — gold” (nocens ferrum ferroque nocentius aurum, Met.
1.140 – 41); cf. Ars Am.3.123 – 24, with R. K. Gibson 2003, ad loc.
Virgil may again be picking up on a theme from Catullus 64, where the
Golden Age metaphor is also complicated and “literalized” in the splendid gold of
Peleus’s palace (64.44), as shown by Bramble (1970, 39); cf. Fitzgerald 1995, 149.
Cf. Galinsky 1996, 98, on this “dilemma” as “one of the many creative ten-
sions of the Augustan culture”; cf. P. White 1993, 189. We return at the end of the next
chapter to the importance of the site of Rome in Aeneid8 for the theme of chronolog-
ical disjunction.
Wallace-Hadrill 1982, 27; Galinsky 1996, 99 – 100; R. K. Gibson 2003, 135 – 36;
especially A. Barchiesi 1997, 232 – 37.
Cf. P. Hardie 1991, 62 – 63.
This devastating puncturing of the Golden Age balloon is repeated shortly
thereafter when Janus says that Saturn, the presiding deity of the pre-Iron Age, came
to Latium on — of all things — a ship (233 – 34).
Cf. A. Barchiesi 1997, 235 – 36: “ ‘Gold ’ has changed its place in the sequence
of the Ages, but it has not brought a moral renaissance with it.... Rome is now a city
of gold, but only for the splendor of her monuments and the political and social power
offinance.”
Syme 1978, 47: “A delightful passage. The god corroborates the poet ’s moder-
nity and dismisses, by implication, the archaic fancies and fraudulence on high show in
Augustan Rome.”
A. Barchiesi 1997, 236.
154.Met.15.857 – 60: cf. Feeney 1991, 221; on Tacitus’s analogous undoing of the
Golden Age ideology of Augustus at Ann.3.28.3, see Woodman and Martin 1996,
ad loc.
Champlin 2003b, 127 – 28.
156.Ep.115.12 – 13, quoting Ov. Met.2.1 – 2, 107 – 8.
Champlin 2003b, 128.
158.Aen.1.353 – 59. At the end of the episode (16.3.2), Tacitus describes Bassus’s
Dido-like end, as he regains his senses and commits suicide to escape shame and fear
(Tacitus prefers this version to a less sensational one, of arrest, confiscation, and
release).
In general, on Tacitus’s hostility to Virgilian concepts of a return to an Age of
Gold, see Heilman 1989, 389 – 90, 394 – 97.
See especially Courtney 1987; Baldwin 1995; Horsfall 1997; Champlin 2003c.
Champlin 2003b, 9 – 21 (“an afterlife that was unique in antiquity,” 9); cf.
notes to pages 134 – 136
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