The Nomadic Alternative – Page 136

degeneration from the Incorruptible to the Tarnished, the

Corroded and the Rusty. Our present age would correspond to the
Fragmented.

"In the beginning", he wrote, "the immortal Gods who live on
Mount Olympus created a golden race of men, who were gifted with
articulate speech. They lived at a time when Cronos ruled in
Heaven. And they lived like Gods, their minds carefree, far removed
from anxiety or hardship. They did not suffer the miseries of old
age, but with hands and feet unfailing continued to enjoy their
abundance, far from the reach of disaster. All their needs were
provided, since the fertile earth bore fruit in plenty and without
stint. They foraged over their lands, with everything they required,
rich in flocks and loved by the blessed Gods." (110-12)

Vegetarians, pacifists, anarchists and sexual exhibitionists
have all invoked the Golden Age as a convincing precedent for their
activities. But Hesiod's account never transcends the bounds of
probability. It provides a psychologically satisfying explanation
for the present predicament of man and suggests that things were
not always so bad; and, as an early foray into cultural anthropology,
evokes the phase which the 19th Century, with its mania for tech-
nology, misnamed the Palaeolithic. The men of Hesiod's Golden Age
were men, not Gods. They spoke. They lived in a state of material
plenty. Death came for them when their time came and they suffered
no senile decay. Without possessions, houses or war, they moved
freely over their lands foraging as they went. This was the Age of
Cronos, the Supreme Being who reigned in the sky and who regulated
the affairs of men in phases of cyclical, regenerative, biological
time. Only when Zeus overthrew Cronos did the linear historical
concept of time take over. Then little by little the human condition
grew worse, as the madness of war and lust for possessions supplanted
the First State. Hesiod also had the acuity to distinguish between
two kinds of strife, which he subdivided into 'healthy competition'
and 'aggressive fury'. Eris, or strife, had not been relevant to
the Golden Age; but with the gradual tarnishing of human affairs