I went to a conference this weekend that got me thinking about what Classics still has to tell us at the end of the world. The most basic point, I guess, is the one that Lucretius makes at the close of book two of De rerum natura, which is that things don’t really end: they just keep getting worse.* If the world did end, we’d be lucky.
One of the oldest Greek poems we have comes at the problem with a certain directness. In his myth (or theory?) of the four ages, Hesiod describes the opposite of progress: we’ve been headed state down from the start, from gold through silver and bronze and the heroes (a brief upturn) to iron, which is where we’re at now. The age of iron is a punitive era, where justice – which once was internal to the world – now has to be imposed from outside against a race of men that only wants to kick against the pricks. Eventually, once things get bad enough, Zeus is going to blow us up – and we’ll deserve it. Hesiod was maybe the first law-and-order voter.
Hesiod, Vergil (in the Georgics) and Lucretius are all agreed that the Earth used to be a lot more fertile, too. The fact that we live in latter days also explains why we have to work so damn hard just to eat: “pater ipse colendi haud facilem viam esse voluit.” And that’s just going to get worse, too, unless, as Vergil advises, we trade our crops for honey-making bees – a strategy some U.S. farmers have actually employed in recent decades. You can make a lot more money gathering nectar from other peoples’ crops than by growing your own.
But we can’t all join the busy bees of the financial sector: if we did, there’d be nothing to make honey out of. Most of us are going to be stuck grinding crops out of the unwilling Earth through the rest of this long (perhaps endless) age of iron. Or perhaps it is a gilded age after all, a new age of gold, which is, as Ovid points out, “ferro nocentius.” Even gold gets turned to evil in the age of iron.
This wasn’t what most of the people at the conference had in mind, though. They were thinking of Trump and global warming – really more a fortuitous conjunction than a causal pair, but they’re both hitting at the same time, so there you go. The classics have a lot to say about Trump-like figures, but nothing useful: the closest anyone comes is probably Tacitus, who throughout his work takes a caustic attitude towards the kind of performative #resistance that leads to an ambitiosa mors. As to global warming, well, nobody could conceive of it – except, weirdly, Gregory the Great, who thought that parts of the world were getting hotter as the end times approached because the furnaces of hell were kindling up.
*Lucretius does of course think that the mundum we inhabit is going to disappear some day, but it’s more like getting old than sudden death. Cosmic cataclysms are for Stoics.