Golden age

See also: Age, the Golden age (homonymy)

The golden age belongs to the myth of the ages of humanity, with the money age, the Bronze Age and the age of iron.

Sources of the myth

The description of the four ages appears in the Théogonie (= birth of the gods) and in Work and the Days of Hésiode; two works dating approximately from the seventh century before JC. The Roman poet Ovide (Publius Ovidius Naso) took again the myth at the beginning of the metamorphoses . The golden age is that which follows the creation of the man immediately whereas Saturn reign in the sky: it is a time of innocence, justice, abundance and happiness; the Earth enjoys one perpetual spring, the fields produce without culture, the men lives almost eternally and dies without suffering, falling asleep for always.

The golden age then symbolizes a period relative to a past prosperous and become mythical. With the the Middle Ages, the golden age becomes on the other hand a promise, that of a paradisiac future.

Characteristics

This also called mythical time “Saturn reign” is thus the first age of creation, an eternal spring: “In the absence of any dispenser of justice, spontaneously, without law, the bona fide and honesty were practiced there. (...) The Earth itself, also, free of very forced, saved by the tooth of the Grubbing-hoe, being unaware of the wound of the Plowshare, gave without being solicited all its fruits. ”

But Saturn was precipitated in darkness of the Tartar and it was Jupiter which became the Master of the world. The money age began.

One also finds evocations of the Golden age among other Latin authors and poets such as Tibulle, in one of his elegies, and at Virgile, in Géorgiques. The myth of the golden age took an particular importance under Auguste who then seemed the man able to bring back humanity, if not at the golden age, at least at a new age better than that in which its contemporaries lived and that they compared with the age iron. The Roman Empire left indeed a second civil war and the Romans saw as a Auguste that which had managed to restore the order. The golden age is also evoked at Fénelon in book XIII of the Adventures of Télémaque.

Interpretation of the myth

Actually, the Romans did not believe in this myth but it symbolized the nostalgia of a better past, the first times of Rome, when the citizens were naturally good and virtuous.

  • the absence of seasons is symbolic system of the escape of time, considered in ancient Rome as the origin of the decline, of a progressive deterioration, Tempus edax rerum (" the time which devours the choses").
  • Certaines parts of the myth shows the vision which the Romans of the first Men had: wandering beings, without roof, living of gathering and ignoring agriculture.

Tibulle, Elegies:

Quam uiuebant bucket Saturno rege, priusquam As one lived well under the Saturn reign, front Tellus in longas is patefacta uias! how the ground is not torn by long roads! Nondum caeruleas pinus contempserat undas, the pine had not scorned the blued waves yet Praebueratque Effusum uentis sinum, and had not shown with the wind a deployed sail, and Nec uagus ignotis repetens conpendias terris did not wander, seeking the profit in grounds unknown factors

This definition gave many allegorical paintings as from the Rebirth, where figure in particular the bay-tree, emblem of Apollon.

Isaïe, the Hebrew prophet of seventh century BC described the golden age by being made the interpreter of the Éternel:

“You will be delighted and you will be penetrated of joy because of the things which I will create you, because I from there will go Jerusalem a town of joy and his people people of joy…
The men will build houses and they will live them; they will plant vines and they will eat the fruits of them. They will not build houses so that another lives there; they will not plant a vine so that another the fruit there…
eats They will not work in vain any more, and will not generate any more of the children with fear; because they will be the posterity of blessed of the Eternal and their grandchildren will be it like them…
And it will happen that before they shout, I will exaucerai them, and when they still speak, I will have already heard them. The wolf and the lamb together will feed, and the lion will eat straw and grass like ox, and dust will be the food of the snake; they will not harm, will not kill and will not make any damage in all the mountain of my holiness. ”
Isaïe prophet

It will be noted that the evocations of a last Golden age multiply periodically in the nostalgic speeches of the contemporary companies. One for example indicated kind the Belle time or the Années 1940. Raoul Girardet proposes a critical analysis of this political Mythe in its work Mythes and mythologies .

Sources

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