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.
Read more about this topic: Golden Age
Famous quotes containing the words golden age, political, significance, golden and/or age:
“Firm in our beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The New Age? It’s just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds.”
—James Randi (b. 1928)