Political Significance of The Golden Age
The political interpretation given the Golden Age by Virgil, who situated it in the future, resurfaced in subsequent eras of revolutionary change. The Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England was frequently hailed by her supporters as the virgin goddess Astraea, and the famous lines of Virgil's fourth Eclogue quoted above are supposed to be the source of the motto Novus ordo seclorum (New Order of the Ages) that appears on the Great Seal of the United States. The British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) hailed the promise of the romantic and revolutionary era with these lines, which foretell the dissolution of empires and the advent of a new religion, superior even to Christianity:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream....
Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued.
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.
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Famous quotes containing the words golden age, political, significance, golden and/or age:
“The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
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“The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.”
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