Virgil the Aeneid; pt 13 book VII: the Latins & the golden age

see entire post series on the Aeneid here

Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo,
sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.

Golden was sown that first age, which,
without coercion and laws,
spontaneously nurtured the good and the true.

Ovid Metamorphoses
I.90

When I first read these lines from Ovid many years ago, I think there awoke a sense of the universality of the memory, or perhaps the desire, for paradise. That place where the good and the true arise effortlessly, built into the very fabric of the earth.  Though we live in a fallen world, there are many who look longingly to Eden.  Paradise is not a creation of the Christian religion (though I would say it is a creation of the Christian God).  This is a larger memory of a time and place when humanity chose the good and the true.  What kind of place it was I will leave for others to consider.  For myself, I see in the ancient idea of the "Golden Age" a human awareness that the present experience of the world is not what it was, nor what it was intended to be.  And if memory is also a close cousin to the faculty which looks forward (for it seems to me that the capacity of memory can move in two directions - we merely think of its capacity to look behind, but it can also look ahead) then this idea of the Golden Age is also a foretaste of something yet to come.

King Latinus echoes these sentiments to the emissary of Aeneas:

Know that our Latins
Come of Saturn’s race, that we are just –
Not by constraint or laws, but by our choice
And habit of our ancient God
VII.268

There is such a perfect balance of nature and reason in Latinus.  It is still the golden age for them. When Aeneas' men tell Latinus that they have come by the will of Fate, Latinus himself immediately recognizes the truth of their claim.  He recalls a prophecy given by old Faunus, and instantly "knows" that this Aeneas is the man about whom the prophecy was spoken:

This is the man…by fate appointed
Called to reign here with equal authority
The man whose heirs will be brilliant in valor
And win the mastery of the world
VII.342

This is paradise - an unmistakable knowledge of the divine will, and a desire to see it accomplished.

[unfortunately, paradise is lost, as other tasks call, and I'll try to return to this book later on this evening]