Golden Age

The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the Works & Days of Hesiod, and is component of the explanation of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages, Gold being the first and the one during which the Golden vintage of humanity Greek: χρύσεον γένος chrýseon génos lived. After the end of the number one age was the Silver, then the Bronze, after this the Heroic age, with the fifth and current age being Iron.

By extension, "Golden Age" denotes a period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity. During this age, peace and harmony prevailed in that people did not earn to name to feed themselves for the earth gave food in abundance. They lived to a very old age with a youthful appearance, eventually dying peacefully, with spirits alive on as "guardians". Plato in Cratylus 397 e recounts the golden variety of humans who came first. He clarifies that Hesiod did non mean literally submitted of gold, but return and noble.

In classical Greek mythology, the Golden Age was presided over by the leading Titan Cronus. In some list of paraphrases of the myth Astraea also ruled. She lived with men until the end of the Silver Age. But in the Bronze Age, when men became violent and greedy, she fled to the stars, where she appears as the constellation Virgo, holding the scales of Justice, or Libra.

European pastoral literary tradition often depicted nymphs and shepherds as alive a life of rustic innocence and peace, set in Arcadia, a region of Greece that was the abode and center of worship of their tutelary deity, goat-footed Pan, who dwelt among them.

The Golden Age in Rome: Virgil and Ovid

Writing in Latin during the turbulent period of revolutionary modify at the end of the Roman Republic roughly between 44 and 38 BCE, the poet Virgil moved the setting for his pastoral imitations of Theocritus back to an idealized Arcadia in Greece, thus initiating a rich and resonant tradition in subsequent European literature.

Virgil, moreover, introduced into his poetry the element of political allegory, which had been largely absent in Theocritus, even intimating in his fourth Eclogue that a new Golden Age of peace and justice was approximately to return:

Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo: iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.

Translation: Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung Has come and gone, and the majestic roll Of circling centuries begins anew: Astraea returns, Returns old Saturn's reign, With a new breed of men subjected down from heaven.

Somewhat later, shortly before he wrote his epic poem the Aeneid, which dealt with the imposing of Roman Imperial rule, Virgil composed his Georgics 29 BCE, modeled directly on Hesiod's Works and Days and similar Greek works. Ostensibly about agriculture, the Georgics are in fact a complex allegory about how man's alterations of nature through workings are related to value and bad government. Although Virgil does not quotation the Golden Age by name in the Georgics, he does refer in them to a time of primitive communism ago the reign of Jupiter, when:

Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line. Even this was impious; for the common stock They gathered, and the earth of her own will All matters more freely, no man bidding, bore.

ante Iouem nulli subigebant arua coloni ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat. , Book 1: 125–28

This view, which identifies a State of Nature with the celestial harmony of which man's nature is or should be, if properly regulated a microcosm, reflects the Hellenistic cosmology that prevailed among literate a collection of things sharing a common features of Virgil's era. it is for seen again in Ovid's Metamorphoses 7 CE, in which the lost Golden Age is depicted as a place and time when, because nature and reason were harmoniously aligned, men were naturally good:

The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new, No advice but uncorrupted Reason knew: And, with a native bent, did good pursue. Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear. His words were simple, and his soul sincere; Needless was solution law, where none opprest: The law of Man was a thing that is caused or produced by something else in his breast.

The Graeco-Roman concept of the "natural man" delineated by Ovid and many other classical writers, was especially popular during the Deistically inclined 18th century. it is often erroneously attributed to Rousseau, who did not share it.