Ovid on Nascent Humanity Watched by Angels

Ovid, A.S. Kline (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying Ovid's description of the Golden Age from the Metamorphoses, book I lines 89-112, in A.S. Kline's prose translation, with a footnote which supplies the reading the file is filed under — that the passage describes humanity's early third primitive root-race.

The description works almost entirely by naming what did not yet exist. The Golden Age nurtured the good and the true spontaneously, without coercion and without laws: no fear or punishment, no threatening words fixed in bronze to be read, no crowd of suppliants fearing the judge's face, and people living safely without protection. No pine felled in the mountains had yet reached the waves to travel to other lands, so that human beings knew only their own shores; there were no ditches round towns, no war-trumpets, no coiled horns, no swords and helmets, and lives passed in gentle peace without armies. The earth is then described as producing everything of herself, freely, without the scars of ploughs or the touch of hoes, so that men were content with food that grew uncultivated — mountain strawberries, the fruit of the strawberry tree, wild cherries, blackberries clinging to the brambles, and acorns fallen from Jupiter's oak. The closing lines make the season permanent and the abundance extravagant: spring eternal, gentle breezes caressing flowers that grew unseeded, fields whitening with heavy ears of corn without needing renewal, and rivers of milk and streams of nectar, with golden honey trickling from the green holm oak.

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