The Golden Age in Book 1

The myth of the Golden Age,^[5] since it is fundamentally opposed to progressivism, is a striking motif in a work ostensibly dedicated to agriculture. One might well assume that pride in and conviction of the value of agriculture would motivate a writer treating georgic themes. In Varro (1.2.16, 2.1.13), for example, one finds a positive, progressivistic expression of man's technology, knowledge, and ability to make nature productive for his own purposes.^[6] With praise and enthusiasm for the development of agricultural technology, he represents man as coming from a primitive state and from an absence of skill and as progressing towards valuable knowledge. In the Georgics, however, allusions to past abundance (e.g., 1.127–32) compel the reader to envision the whole of civilization and its technology as a continuing attempt to compensate for the loss of the Golden Age. The very need of agriculture confirms the absence of this ideal (ipsaque tellus/omnia liberius, nullo poscente, ferebat, "Earth yielded

all, of herself, more freely, when none begged for her gifts" 1.127–28).

The initial description in the Georgics of the Golden Age (1.121ff.), with its ethic of sharing and harmony between men and nature, establishes a standard set of features that recur in subsequent variations on this theme. Of these I will discuss the so-termed praises of Italy (2.136ff.), of spring (2.323–45ff.), and of country life (2.458ff.) in Book 2; the passages on the Scythians (3.349–83) and on the plague (3.478–566) in Book 3; and in Book 4 the passages on the bees (4.1–115, 149–218) and on the Corycian gardener (4.116–48). In Books 2 and 4 resemblances between the Golden Age and the present are unmistakable, if ultimately delusive. The passages on the Scythians and on the plague in Book 3, however, take a different approach to the Golden Age. These passages are perversions or travesties of certain features typical of the Golden Age (as, for example, property held in common, peace among usually predatory animals, and harmony between animals and men). By isolating certain of these conventionally Golden Age features and thereby revealing them to be insufficient in themselves to constitute or to restore a Golden Age, the poet suggests that the elusive essential of the Golden Age is a spiritual quality of mutuality or community. This vision of a moral community, without which discrete Golden Age features remain morally inert, appears to be, as we have seen, the exclusive preserve of the poet.

The Golden Age ideal, as it is first described at 1.125–35, sets, by virtue of its initial position, the standard for the variations that follow. The passage suggests the absence of aggression, of private interest; it suggests sharing among men and a spontaneous giving from nature to man:

ante lovem nulli subigebant arva coloni:
ne signare quidem aut partiri limite campum
fas erat; in medium quaerebant, ipsaque tellus
omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat.
ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris,
praedarique lupos iussit pontumque moveri,
mellaque decussit foliis ignemque removit
et passim rivis currentia vina repressit,
ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis

paulatim, et sulcis frumenti quaereret herbam,
ut silicis venis abstrusum excuderet ignem.
(1.125–35)

Before Jove's time no settlers brought the land under subjection;
Not lawful even to divide the plain with landmarks and boundaries:
They sought the common good, and earth unprompted
Was freer with all her fruits.
Jove put the wicked poison in the black serpent's tooth,
Jove told the wolf to ravin, the sea to be restive always,
He shook from the leaves their honey, he had all fire removed,
And stopped the wine that ran in rivers everywhere,
So that practice by experiment might forge various crafts
Little by little, might seek the corn-blade in the furrow,
And strike the hidden fire that lies in the veins of flint.

In verses 125–28, two of which are negative statements and two positive, the poet sketches the essence of his Golden Age. No farmers "subdued" the fields, that is, man was not an aggressor in his relationship to nature. Neither was he dominating or possessive, for private ownership of nature by man was not allowed (126–27). Fas ("right," "lawful" 127) is a strongly emotive, powerful term, indicating that this Golden Age had an internal moral quality that functioned in such a way as to protect man from moral compromise in his relationship with nature. Among men there was sharing and pursuit of common interest (in medium quaerebant 127) and from nature an abundance of giving (ipsaque tellus/omnia liberius . . . ferebat 127–28) even in the absence of demand.^[7] What existed, then, was an ethic of sharing and community among men as well as between men and nature. Once, therefore, there existed a nonexploitive relationship between men and nature, when earth poured forth

nec commune bonum poterant spectare neque ullis
moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti.

For the common good they had no eye, nor knew
Of the mutual uses of custom or of law.

plenty and men did not manipulate or do violence against nature in order to survive. Neither, consequently, was there competition or conflict between men, since all was abundant and given into the common store. While the Golden Age apparently accords no value or expression to individual strivings (this is, in any case, not mentioned in the text and seems to be precluded by in medium quaerebant ), it also denies expression to individual competition and its worst consequences—murder and war (e.g., 1.505–14).

It has been possible, in reading this passage, to draw many inferences from few details. The qualities of this Golden Age (not even so termed by the poet)^[8] must be inferred and defined from their absence, since their description is indirect. Readers cannot envisage this Golden Age from the poet's description, but must fill in the gaps created by negative statements from their own imagination, sentiment, and knowledge of literary tradition. For example, because Jove put poison into snakes, one must infer that once they had none. Because he struck honey from trees, one must infer that once it flowed freely from them. To describe the Golden Age in this way is to leave it to readers to imagine, to create or conceive in their own minds, the alternative values that the poet is indirectly suggesting. From its absence readers may conceive what they might desire and aspire to. The genius of the Georgic poet's description of the Golden Age is to have engaged the readers' own creative responsiveness on behalf of values or of a vision that they might not otherwise endorse.

A most powerful and ironic event in the history of the Iron Age is the role played by Jove.^[9] As noted above, the character of the Golden Age was deeply moral, for it was not fas (a term that connotes in itself divine approbation) to subdue or even to possess the fields. There was no competition, since earth provided all in abundance and since men sought the common, not the individual, good. There is, therefore, no heedless or irrespon-

sible element in this vision of the Golden Age. Rather there is an ethic of sharing and responsibility towards others, explicit in in medium quaerebant . Because this period recalls the Golden Age, because it is characterized by fas, the reader is led to perceive it as positive. The irony (which is a function fundamentally of disparity)^[10] of Jove's attitude towards the Golden Age is that in this period of moral harmony and absence of strife, he saw only veternus ("inactivity," "lethargy" 1.124). This perception of Jove's illuminates indirectly his own moral values:

pater ipse colendi
haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem
movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda
nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno.
(1.121–24)

The father himself did not wish the way of
agriculture to be easy, and he first stirred
the fields through art, sharpening mortal hearts
with care, not enduring his realms
to be sluggish with lethargy.^[11]

Jove creates conditions that compel man to material, but not to moral or spiritual, goals.fr12 As represented here Jove is without

concern for moral conscience or spiritual purpose in man. In order to compel man to activity Jove must make the world, initially hospitable towards man, inhospitable. He withdraws the natural abundance of honey, fire, and wine; he poisons and represses. In this way he drives man, whose survival is now in question, into an adversarial relationship with nature. As man must subdue the fields and conquer nature, so labor conquers him:

labor omnia vicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.^[13
] (1.145–46)

Labor conquered everything,
perverse labor, and driving need in hard circumstances.

The military mode connoted by vicit (145) thus epitomizes the new regime, in which total community has been replaced by total combat. Man becomes simultaneously victim and victor, besieged by want, oppressed by labor. Man's technologies, represented as "the rending and perversion of natural things,^[14] force him into the role of predator (captare, "capture"), destroyer (verberat, "whip," scindebant, "rend"), deceiver (fallere, "deceive"), this last term suggesting the absence of an ethical component in the new age. Whereas in the Golden Age there was interest in the common good, in the Iron Age an individual who

fails to sustain himself is abandoned, envying others' private plenty, to starve alone:

heu magnum alterius frustra spectabis acervum,
concussaque famem in silvis solabere quercu.^[15
] (1.158–59)

Vainly alas will you eye another man's heaped-up harvest
and relieve your own hunger by shaking an oak in the woods.

Each man works only for himself, without responsibility, as previously, for the general welfare. As a result of Jove's intervention, then, man's moral relationship both to nature and to other men is compromised, for his survival requires continuing departure from the ideals of the Golden Age. Man's ambiguous moral position on the earth can never he resolved or ameliorated, but is a condition of the Iron Age.

As Jove's primary concern is for something other than morality or spiritual quality, so the Georgic poet does not show modern man making meaningful moral choices. Rather man is absorbed by care (curis acuens mortalia corda 1.123); overwhelmed by war (saevit toto Mars impius orbe 1.511), by passion (in furias ignemque ruunt 3.244), by disease (contactos artus sacer ignis edebat 3.566), or by failure (ibi omnis effusus labor 4.491–92). This view of man is corroborated by the adjectives that the poet attributes to him: ignarus ("ignorant" 1.14), avarus ("greedy" 1.47), durus ("hard" 1.63), aeger ("weak" 1.237), acer ("harsh" 2.405), tristis ("sad" 3.517), and miser ("wretched" 3.313). Men have transient joys when freed from work, but find themselves, overall, subject to destructive forces more powerful than they, such as universal decline (1.199–203) or pervasive war (1.511–14). Iron Age man relies on his labor for survival and for glory. Yet the failure of labor is a recurrent motif in the Georgics (1.324–26; 3.97–98, 525; 4.491–92).^[16] This picture does contrast

non illum nostri possunt mutare labores

That god [i.e., Love] no labors of ours can change.

with Hesiod who asserts, on occasion (e.g., Works and Days 308–13), a correlation between work and prosperity.

In sum the poet represents early society as communal and generous, without sin or aggression. To this vision he juxtaposes, without explicitly qualifying them, technological achievements that are, by implication, of a violent and destructive character (1.139–45). Man's technology is not praised by Virgil, nor indeed is it qualified in any way. Since the poet uses no adjectives at all, he leaves the possibility open to the reader to see in the discovery of technology either a positive or a negative development. Thus the poet is deliberately uncommitted, allowing the ambiguous potential of labor and ars to suggest itself.^[17]

Besides being morally ambiguous, the arts that man has been compelled to contrive are all aimed at material survival and therefore lead to visible and quantifiable, but not to moral or esthetic, progress. Under Jove's dispensation man pursues the material and practical, but lives without fas or art, a suggestive omission for a poet to allow. Virgil's description differs, in this respect, from those of his two major models, Lucretius and Hesiod. Lucretius, as we have seen, includes poetry, painting, and sculpture in his history of civilization (5.1448–53). Equally in Hesiod we find that Zeus likes poetry and is, indeed, the father of the Muses (e.g., Theog. 36–43, 53ff.) In the Georgics, however, Jove, like the farmers of Georgic 2 or the Romanized bees of Georgic 4, is indifferent to art. Poetry and song do not address the problem of material progress. It is most probably for this reason that Jove does not attend to them.

This passage on the development of civilization as we know it has several echoes in the concluding lines of Book 1, where the poet describes wars raging out of control. Fas recurs (127, 505), as do robigo ("mildew," "rust" 151, 495), lupus ("wolf" 130, 486), arma ("arms" 160, 511). These echoes suggest that the passages are in some way paired and, therefore, invite comparison. Thus the reader is invited to compare the life of Golden Age

man with that of his contemporary Romans. Civilization has evolved from universal harmony to almost universal war, from the reign of moral law to the confusion of right and wrong (fas versum atque nefas 505). Jove appears more offended by veternus than by nefas .

In conclusion, the Golden Age in Book 1 is defined by community among men, who pursue the common good, and between men and nature, which gives forth bounteously. There is no domination or manipulation of nature. There is no agricultural labor, perhaps no labor of any kind (i.e., perhaps no poetry). Subsequent variations on the Golden Age motif echo and also question this initial version in various ways.