The Nomadic Alternative – Page 137

The rabid form increased at the expense of the latter. Cronos retired, an exhausted old-fashioned immortal no longer capable of appreciating the realities of the modern world. "Cronos rump, old and insensible flesh", sneered Aristophanes.

The arrival of Pandora with her box of ills marks the final collapse of the Golden Age. In Hesiod's scheme Pandora was a baked pottery female figure, decked with golden necklaces, a bloated and burnished image of plenty, such as excavators have found in the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age settlements of Thrace. Since her day "countless plagues wander among men". Disease, the malaise of settlement, and the use of fire in industry combine in her vicious person. And though the incorruptible men of the Golden Race had gone without a murmur, Hesiod refuses to admit their complete disappearance and adds that they continue to roam the earth shrouded in mist, as benign spirits, the guardians of all that is good. His Golden Age was not a bright island in the mind, but an archaic phase of human culture which had faded from view with the invention of agriculture and metallurgy. That is to say, his Men of the Golden Race were hunters and gatherers, like the Yaghan, some of whom survived in the lands that bordered on the Mediterranean until late antiquity. Our word 'savage' comes from the Latin silvatious - a 'forest dweller'. These wild people of the woods resurfaced as the silens, nymphs, fauns, and satyrs in the stories of mythographers, but they also appealed to the imagination of more prosaically-minded historians and geographers.

Tacitus, for example, after enumerating the virtues and faults of the Ancient Germans, speaks of a simple hunting people, the Fenni, who lived deep in the marshes of the Vistula.

They have no arms, no homes, no hope lies in their arrows which, for lack of iron, they tip with bone. The only way they can protect their babies against the wild beasts or foul weather is to hide under a makeshift network of branches ... Yet they count their lot happier than that of the others who groan over field labour, sweat over house-building, or hazard their own or other men's fortunes in the wild lottery of hope and fear. They care for nobody, man nor god, and have achieved the ultimate release; they have nothing to pray for.

(Germania 46)