Golden age and Roman land surveying

Abstract

Starting from Hesiod, the myth of an earlier, happy and untroubled period of mankind, the Golden Age, was evoked and rewritten several times in ancient classical literature. All these descriptions of the Golden Age include topoi already present in Hesiod’s work: in fact, the poets of the subsequent period reorganized and reinterpreted the same topoi. In the Golden Age, there were no wars and no discordance, people suffered from no diseases, autotelic profit making was non-existent and, therefore, commercial shipping did not evolve either. There was no need for that anyway because land yielded everything without cultivation, and according to certain hypotheses, it even yielded copiously multiple times a year. [excerpt]