The Golden Age and Climate Crisis
Our Nostalgia for the Rhythms of the Natural World is Timeless
This article is part of a special issue on the “End of the World.”
Climate change is no longer a problem of the vague, undefined future; we are living through it. Scientists can model for us the effects that climate change will have on the planet, but they can’t prepare us for what effects it will have on us. As a result, we’re all grasping to find the right narrative to fit our experiences. And while greenhouse gas emissions are a uniquely modern problem, it turns out the narratives we’re using to understand our predicament are very old.
We’re not the first humans to fret about our dependence on the earth or to fear any change to the planet that might affect our survival. In antiquity, these fears often manifested in myths, such as that of the Golden Age, about a type of event that will feel quite familiar: a sudden and drastic change to the earth that fundamentally alters human life forever. In fact, the vestiges of this Golden Age myth can be glimpsed in modern reactions to our new normal. This connection shows just how old that fear of environmental change is and all the myriad ways it has influenced our thinking. This myth, and the ideas, values, and anxieties it reflects can help us understand just how much we’re poised to lose. It may seem trivial in comparison with the actual human cost, but beyond rising ocean levels and catastrophic weather events, existential losses are coming too, of things we may not realize are in danger. What the myth of the Golden Age suggests is that we may lose even our concept of time itself.
The Greek and Roman myth of the Golden Age is a story about how humans and the earth once coexisted in an impossibly perfect state and how we lost that. The earliest surviving literary version of the myth is found in Hesiod’s Works and Days, a didactic poem about farming which dates back to the 7th century BCE. In Hesiod’s poem, the Golden Age is regarded as a time when life was better for humans. We didn’t fight, we didn’t want money, and, most importantly, we didn’t farm.
Hesiod narrates a progression of (mostly) metallic ages: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and the age of his own time, the Iron Age. Many other authors tell their own versions, skipping the intermediary metallic periods and just making a distinction between the mythical Golden past and today. Things used to be great; now they aren’t. All the standard complaints about modernity can be worked into this framework; inventions that have led to our current terrible situation include not just agricultural labor and warfare, but also private property, commerce, cities, travel, and even slavery. (There is a galling hypocrisy evident when free, wealthy Greeks and Romans who depend on enslaved labor yearn without irony for a time when slavery didn’t exist). In most of these versions, agriculture is central to the change that occurs. It is the most common dividing line between the life we had before and the life we have now.
Farming can be both cause and effect of that dividing line between the good past and the bad present. In Hesiod’s Golden Age, people didn’t need to farm, because they were so morally virtuous that the Earth gave them everything they needed to survive of her own free will. The toil and drudgery of farming is, in this earliest version, a punishment for our current wickedness. There are other versions of the story: in some, the earth didn’t provide food, so people had to subsist on acorns from oak trees, which, though disgusting, made people better than we are today, because they were hardier. In this version, farming makes our life too easy (tell that to Hesiod!), and the easier access to food we now have becomes proof of our moral failing. These are two very different stories about human subsistence before agriculture: life was easy or life was hard, but in both, humanity used to be good — and that goodness was linked directly to our close relationship to the Earth and to the absence of farming.
This fall, I taught a seminar on the Georgics, the other most famous poem about farming, written by Virgil in the 30s BCE. The Georgics, both because of Hesiod’s influence and because it’s about that crucial skill that separates us from it, uses a lot of Golden Age imagery. In one controversial passage dubbed the “Praises of Italy,” Virgil celebrates his homeland by claiming implausibly that: “Here, spring is perpetual and summer stretches into other months.” (Verg.G.2.149, hic uer adsiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas, all translations are my own) The entire passage draws on imagery of the Golden Age, when the earth made things easy, and humans didn’t need to work for food. Italy is so great, Virgil says, it’s like the Golden Age never ended here. Summer never ends! As my students and I read the passage this past fall in swampy St. Louis, which had record-breaking heat throughout September and into October, it was hard to understand perpetual summer as a description of paradise. Nothing seems more ominous and worrisome to me now than summer weather in non-summer months. As my students and I endured the extreme weather and discussed Virgil’s depiction of farming, I realized how our thinking about the current climate crisis matches Virgil’s about the loss of the Golden Age.
One rarely-discussed invention of the mythical Iron Age is time itself. Hesiod claims that, in both the Golden and the Silver Age, time didn’t affect human bodies the way it does in our age. Golden Age humans never aged at all, and in the Silver Age, people were babies for a hundred years and then died quickly after they matured. Our current biological clock only seems to be in place by the Iron Age. In Aratus’ Phaenomena, an astronomical didactic poem from the 3rd century BCE, the goddess of Justice departs the earth in the Bronze Age because of human wickedness and becomes a constellation (Virgo) in the series that marks the calendar year. The message of that story is that the only justice we can expect now is the orderly passing of time.
This absence of (the passing of) time is a central feature of not just the Golden Age, but also of many other concepts of paradise. Post-mortem heavens obviously don’t need time, because death is forever. Things grow continuously in the Garden of Eden. Even the paradise in the TV show “The Good Place” operates on its own time-scale — not in a straight line, but in a shape that looks like the name Jeremy Bearimy. We hate time so much that we can’t imagine it existing in a perfect world.
We measure time in two ways that are both dependent on the natural world. The first comes from astronomical bodies: the hours, the day and the year derive from the length of the earth’s orbit around the sun, the month from the moon’s orbit around the earth. In antiquity, this dependence would have been felt daily, as the length of the ancient hour was not absolute, but depended on the time of year. Since every day was divided into twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of nighttime, the length of those hours waxed and waned as the year progressed. That’s how sundials measure time: by dividing it into portions of the semi-circle. Since we decided to measure time, our experience of it has always been mediated by technology.
Our other measures of time — seasons, holidays, associated foods — are linked to the agricultural year. These tend to differ culture by culture, just as the agricultural year itself differs in various climates and hemispheres. But the connection between our concept of seasonal time and farming is a fairly common one. The myth of the abduction of Persephone makes that connection directly. Persephone’s mother Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, creates the seasons through her joy and sorrow at the presence and absence of her daughter, who must spend half the year in the Underworld. In this worldview, the seasons themselves only exist because they affect when things can grow.
If Hesiod and Virgil can teach us anything, it is that making a living from the earth is always really hard. And farming has been especially difficult of late. In the spring of 2019, the Mississippi River experienced massive flooding from its source in Minnesota all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Farmers throughout the Midwest had to postpone their planting season, or even abandon fields altogether for the year. If they did get the seeds in, it was late, but corn takes the same amount of time to grow if it’s planted in April or in June. An Illinois farmer showed my Georgics class around his farm in September and stressed to us the precise timing of harvesting your crops. Crops need to have reached the right height before it freezes, but the weather also has to be dry, so you can’t harvest immediately after a rainfall. This autumn, there were only a few weeks in the St. Louis area between the last ninety-degree day and the first snowflakes.
Most scientists hesitate to definitively connect short-term weather with long-term climate change (although some scientists are starting to). That’s one of the problems with grappling with the issue of climate change: the experts are judicious enough to be cautious about definitively asserting causation. But the models for climate change predict that unusual weather will become more common: more droughts, more floods, more late heat spells, more early frosts. The weather will get more erratic, harder to predict.
There is a strange kind of irony in the fact that anthropogenic climate change is manifesting itself in the weather. Farmers today can control almost every aspect of their crops: the seeds are genetically modified to resist the herbicides and pesticides that they apply to kill everything else; the levels of water and nitrogen in the soil are tracked with an app. They don’t even need to till the soil or let fields lie fallow anymore. The one thing that farmers can’t control is the weather (except in greenhouses). As the farmer we met put it, when I asked about improved weather prediction, “They can predict it. They can’t change, stop, or prevent it.” The only aspect of farming that is still largely a matter of chance are the meteorological conditions in the fields, the only aspect that humans can’t control. Our own actions are making it more erratic and extreme.
Our ability to predict the weather, if imperfectly, has long been the consolation of our Iron Age existence; this ability is the entire point of Hesiod’s Works & Days, in fact, given its organization as an almanac of sorts. Time may be unpleasant, but it’s necessary for our survival in this less-than-perfect world. Weather tends to change with the seasons: as the days get shorter, it gets colder, and vice versa. This allowed us to make predictions and plan. Virgil says that Jupiter took away the blessings of the Golden Age in order that we might develop methods of survival (including farming) based on experience (usus), or rather, repetitive trial and error. We spent a long time experimenting to figure out how to grow things, experiments that only worked because we could rely on the same climatic conditions. That regular climatic progression of hot to cool to cold to warm, back to hot again? That’s time. These myths show the deep associations between time, the agricultural year, and our ability to survive.
Our concepts of time may have derived originally from the natural world, but they have been shifting over the past few hundred years. Some changes are due to advances in the mediating technology: mechanical gears allowed for clocks, fixing the length of an hour and divorcing it from the amount of sunlight in any given day. Electric lights now blot out the stars in most parts of the US and other developed countries, making it impossible to keep time by the night sky the way Aratus could. Some of our structures of time have changed due to capitalism: on the largest scale, the industrial revolution fundamentally changed our work patterns as we moved away from an agrarian society. More superficially, the earlier and earlier encroachment of Christmas decorations and products in stores prompts laments every year.
Consider the Pumpkin Spice Latte: a product originally developed to sell more coffee by capitalizing on the association of pumpkins and the spices we use to flavor them with October and November, an association encoded into our lives by their growing season. The Pumpkin Spice Latte is truly an Iron Age creation. The coffee, the spices themselves, the squash flavoring we insisted be added because we couldn’t parse that “pumpkin” was an adjective in the original name — they all come from different parts of the world. The PSL would not exist without agriculture, nor without the trade with other cultures that Hesiod lamented. This fall, Starbucks introduced the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, the perfect cursed symbol of our current predicament. Is the unseasonably hot October weather making a latte undesirable? You can still get your seasonal flavoring fix, now in a cooler beverage.
Golden Age myths construct a nostalgia for a time when our coexistence with the earth was easier, conveying a sense of being out of sync with the natural world. This feeling pervades our culture today as well, and perhaps has been an aspect of every human society, but may also spike in reaction to times of great transition. In America in 2020, the feeling is often tied to the effects of capitalism. We should eat “seasonally” or “locally,” we are told, avoiding the excess of options that the global trade affords us and aligning our diets to the natural cycles of the year in our part of the world. We may not be able to see the stars at night, but the blue light from our ever-present screens is throwing off our circadian rhythms (so please buy this product to fix it). These are first world problems (because we tend to treat people in developing nations much like we treat people of the Golden Age, but that’s another piece), problems caused by the wealth and abundance we have access to. These anxieties all connect to our feeling that something is off, awry, or just wrong, in our current lives, caused by our separation from the natural world and manifested in our experience of time. We should have to eat differently in the winter, and the fact that we don’t have to now seems somehow bad.
And this time, we may be right. Our consumption habits have been a factor in climate change (we may not be the first in that regard). It’s definitely more environmentally friendly to eat local. Our streaming habits contribute even more to carbon outputs than the refrigeration that allows us to eat globally. All of this is going to get worse as climate change worsens. But do we feel bad because we know this intellectually, or because we’re using these ancient narratives to understand what’s happening?
As I write this, I am keenly aware that I’m using the same narrative structures Hesiod and Virgil use in their depictions of the move from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. Long ago, humans lived more in tune with the natural world than we do today, but then something changed and we lost that connection. Even the mechanisms of that change are the same: technology and monetary desires. Just like in Hesiod’s and Virgil’s versions of the myth, humans bear the moral responsibility for the change. Golden Age myths speak to the deep-seated desire of humans to feel in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world. Even when we’re not following them, we want to feel as if we should be following them. We take comfort in the existence of those rhythms, even in our own failure to adhere to them. What happens when they are gone entirely? What happens when there is no sense of seasonal time to feel alienated from?
Some climate change deniers (or rather, people unwilling to do anything in the face of climate change) have used an image like the one Virgil gives of Italy to claim that global warming will be good: longer seasons and more places open to crops. This may happen, but it won’t mean increased yields. The difficulties farmers are facing demonstrate that the key to farming is not temperature but regularity. The temptation to dream of a return to a better past is also built into these narratives, and we need to guard against it. The mistake is the same as imagining that paradise-like conditions today would mean a new Golden Age. The Golden Age was tied directly to the goodness of the people who lived in it, and we are still Iron Age people. Virgil was himself awake to this problem, and he reminds his addressee that if you don’t work hard constantly on your land, “alas, you will look on another’s huge pile in vain, while you blunt your hunger by shaking the oak in the forest” (heu, magnum alterius frustra spectabis acervum/ concussaque famem in silvis solabere quercu, Verg.G.1.158–59). That is, Virgil says, if you don’t work hard, you’ll be left with just acorns, without the Golden Age to make that diet palatable.
Scholars debate whether Virgil’s “Praises of Italy” is sincere or not. After all, Virgil lived through one of the most tumultuous and politically unstable periods in Roman History, and we can’t decide how happy he was about the state of Italy in the triumviral period. To me, his celebration of Italy’s overlong springs and summers now seems impossibly wrong. In times of great political upheaval, the rhythms of the natural world are a comfort to fall back on. It seems unlikely to me that Virgil would honestly celebrate their absence in Italy, in a poem that argues those very patterns are necessary for our survival. We live in times of great political upheaval as well. What will we do when those rhythms of the natural world are gone for good?
Kathryn Wilson is a lecturer in the Classics Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She works on myth, ancient science, and didactic poetry, and worries a lot about climate change.
