If you’ve read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, you will know—or at least be forced to deny in the face of overwhelming if dull statistical data—that the larger trends in global human felicity are on the upswing. I refer to such major factors as the ravages of war, famine, and disease. The number of our fellow humans who have fairly recently “been brought out of abject poverty” is astonishing. Pinker’s book is in line with a major though historically fairly new trend of optimistic thought—mainly since the Enlightenment—progressivism—documented in another once-famous book by the Cambridge historian J. B. Bury*. Yet one would hardly guess the world’s good news from reading the daily papers or watching the PBS News Hour. There one gets the impression that major world trends have probably never been worse since the time of the Golden Horde, and that in our own country “democracy is imperiled” about the same way it was in Bloody Kansas in 1858. Do not misunderstand me. It’s not that I think everything is just tikkity-boo. I think a lot of things are pretty bad—just not 1348 or 1793 bad. But as a student of earlier periods of history I am aware that the human struggle has in fact been unending. Twice in my own lifetime the pessimism has been tinged with apocalypticism. When I was a child in school the terror was Nuclear Winter. For my young grandchildren it has been Global Warming. We are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, as the Good Book says. What interests me in this essay is the alacrity with which spokesmen of the human race have embraced historical pessimism and continue to do so.
Having too little to do as he lolled around the Tower of London while awaiting eventual execution, the Elizabethan courtier and swashbuckler Sir Walter Raleigh dashed off an 800-page History of the World animated by his imaginative etymology of the word world: “that which groweth worse as it groweth older”. Retrogressivism. It is Raleigh rather than Pinker that my week’s reading in old poems has brought to my mind.
Among the great world myths, to be found in the lore of the most “advanced” of ancient peoples and in the least technologically developed of contemporary indigenous groups, is that of a Golden Age from which the human race has gradually declined or precipitously fallen in its ethical stature, moral grandeur, and state of felicity. Usually, perhaps always, the transformation is the result of moral lapse. Most famous of such myths is that in the Hebrew Scriptures—the story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the forbidden fruit tree. In the early centuries of the formation of Christianity brilliant exegetes derived from this story in the early chapters of Genesis complex doctrines of human nature, the construction of the human psychological apparatus, refined philosophical concepts of the nature of human offense against God (sin), and the consequences of its supposed inheritability, often called Original Sin. In the seventeenth-century the English poet John Milton, probably the best-known epic poet in our tongue, published Paradise Lost, announcing as his theme “Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World, and all our woe, with loss of Eden…” For just as the human race was corrupted, so also did living conditions in our world become harsh and adversarial, and life itself a brutal struggle: vineyards into briar patches, so to speak. The “peaceable kingdom” became the arena of human life “nasty, brutish, and short” in Hobbes’s famous phrase.
The pre-Christian myth of the Golden Age is alluded to by many of the classical Latin writers and treated at some length by the two most important poets among them, Virgil and Ovid. So consonant was it with the account of human origins in the Bible, the Roman myth needed only the slightest humanistic tweaking to enter the mainstream of Christian Latin literature, which it joined via various channels, but especially by way of a magnificent poem (early sixth century) by the brilliant poet-philosopher Boethius. His greatest book, The Consolation of Philosophy is a prosimetrum, a work in which poems and prose passages often work in intellectual symphony. One of the most famous “meters” (poems) in the Consolation begins “How much happier was that earlier age when contented men depended on the faithful fields and, not yet sunk into luxury, satisfied their hunger with easily gathered acorns.” Felicitous, peaceful simplicity of life became deformed by the invention of navigation, leading to trade, and universal avarice. The next steps toward depravity were bloodshed, wars of conquests, and the frantic digging for gold and precious gems.
This short poem (thirty lines) of Boethius had a long afterlife. It was translated or adapted by early poets in most of the European vernaculars—Chaucer included. Chaucer’s “translation” is double the length of that of Boethius, and doubly pessimistic: by its final three lines the moral decline is so bad that nothing is left in the world but “covetousness, duplicity, treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and murder in several varieties.”
Boethius’s Golden Age meter of course derived from earlier Latin literary tradition. The most influential of the classical versions are those of Virgil and, especially, Ovid. Very early in the Metamorphoses Ovid traces universal world history from a Golden Age, ruled by Saturn under Astreia, goddess of justice, through its gradual decline into ages of less precious metals. Things really got tough in the Age of Iron. “Immediately every species of crime burst forth…modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition".
The correspondences Christian theologians found between Moses and Ovid were not simply factitious. Legends of the ruination of our once paradisal planet through human moral depravity are part of the shared stock of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern lore. Virgil, widely believed to have foretold the birth of Christ in his Eclogues, could almost naturally become Dante’s guide to his imagined Christian underworld. The end of the Golden Age and the loss of Eden are fundamentally the same old story of desire and rebellion-- drugs and rock-and-roll being long delayed afterthoughts. The violent end to the Age of Gold came about in this wise. Saturn’s revolting son--“Lecherous” Jupiter as Chaucer calls him—revolted against his father in a most revolting way. He cut off his dad’s private parts and dropped them into the Mediterranean drink. The result this aberrant act of coitus, after a certain period of foaming and bubbling, was the birth of the goddess Venus at Paphos on Cyprus.
Most readers probably consider it inappropriate if not blasphemous to find anything humorous in the scriptural version of the Fall of Man. I do have to say that I find it hard not to smile when I read of the first thing Adam and Eve did following the disaster. They tried to get some underwear on, and quick: “and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Maybe it’s just the Elizabethan use of the word aprons. Once the goddess of love got loose in the world, all hell broke loose, especially when her very naughty kid Cupid was around. It’s more like a belly laugh in Ovid, where one of the first events in the fallen world is Apollo’s mad pursuit of Daphne, the beautiful daughter of a river god. You know about Cupid’s arrows, of which there were two kinds: aphrodisiac and anaphrodisiac. The first inspires a burning sexual passion in its victim, the latter a terrible headache and revulsion at the very idea of sex. Just for the fun of it, Cupid shot Apollo with one of the former and Daphne with one of the latter and sat back to enjoy the fun. This led to a frantic pursuit and many great works of Renaissance art. Just as she was about to be captured and ravished by Apollo, Daphne uttered a desperate prayer to be saved. Salvation came in the form of her miraculous transformation into a tree—the laurel tree, thereafter the Apollonian symbol of poets and poetry. As her tender flesh turned to bark in his hands, and her lovely hair a tangle of leafy twigs, Apollo was forced to reconsider his options. “Well,” he said in effect, “if you won’t be my girlfriend, will you at least be my tree?"
*J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920). A timely study: 20 millions, half of them civilians, had just been killed in the Great War.
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