The Golden Age Of Apocalypse

[Melissa Alvarado]

Howdid the ancient Greeks and Romans envision the end of the world?

What is the long-term future of the human race? Will the world always remain as it is or will it undergo a catastrophic change? What role do the gods, human morality, and the forces of nature play in bringing about the end of the world? In Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star reveals the answers that Greek and Roman authors gave to these questions.

The first large-scale investigation of the various scenarios for the end of the world in classical texts, this book demonstrates that key thinkers often viewed their world as shaped by catastrophe. Star focuses on how this theme was explored over the centuries in the works of poets, such as Hesiod, Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan, and by philosophers, including the Presocratics, Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca. With possibilities ranging from periodic terrestrial catastrophes to the total dissolution of the world, these scenarios address the ultimate limits that define human life and institutions, and place humanity in the long perspective of cosmic and natural history. These texts also explore various options for the rebirth of society after world catastrophe, such as a return of the Golden Age or the redevelopment of culture and political institutions.

Greek and Roman visions of the end, Star argues, are not calls to renounce this world and prepare for a future kingdom. Rather, they are set within larger investigations that examine and seek to improve personal and political life in the present. Contextualizing classical thought about the apocalypse with biblical studies, Star shows that the seeds of our contemporary anxieties about globalization, politics, and technology were sown during the Roman period. Even the prevalent link between an earthly leader and the beginning of the end times can be traced back to Greek and Roman rulers, the emperor Nero in particular. Apocalypse and Golden Age enriches our understanding of apocalyptic thought.

Christopher Star is able to show how the end of the world is figured by Hesiod, Lucretius, Ovid, and Seneca, and, especially, its political, literary, and philosophical function. There is no other book that does this in such a focused and comprehensive way.

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. From Hesiod to Hellenistic Philosophy

2. Lucretius and Cicero: The End of the World at the End of the Roman Republic

3. Golden Age, Apocalypse, and the Age of

It's impossible to listen to this without noticing the nostalgia that infuses it. Arjen Lucassen, if you don't recognise the name, is a Dutch multi-instrumentalist who was born in 1960 and is best known for his long running progressive metal project Ayreon, a revolving door through which many of the greatest names in the genre have wandered. This is his first album as Supersonic Revolution and it looks very specifically back to the seventies, both in the sense of the musical styles of the time and how he personally interacted with it as a teenager.

SR Prelude sets that tone with an instrumental minute and a half that reminds of Deep Purple, Yes and ELP. The Glamattack emphasises Purple but clearly adds Rainbow to the mix and further songs trawl in more influences as needed. Odyssey is lighter and spacier and while it doesn't sound like a Hawkwind song, they can't be ignored. They Took Us by Storm is heavier, placing us in Black Sabbath territory. Fight of the Century often feels like a musical number and, with Jesus Christ Superstar in the lyrics of an earlier song, it's easy to see that approach here.

Almost everything is the seventies, by design, including a very notable seventies organ sound that mostly reminds of Jon Lord's work in Purple but occasionally Ken Hensley's time in Uriah Heep, as on The Rise of the Starman. However, there are glimpses of the eighties that followed, not least in the guitar flourishes of Timo Somers, which sound much more like Yngwie Malmsteen than Ritchie Blackmore. It's there in the voice of Jaycee Cuijpers too, who's halfway between Ronnie James Dio and Graham Bonnet, emphasising one over the other as needed.

The lyrics focus on the seventies too, most obviously in Golden Age of Music, which namechecks an impressive list of names, or at least hints at them. I'm a decade younger than Lucassen but I found rock and metal through the Friday Rock Show on which Tommy introduced me to all of it at once, so I was hearing the Purple Mark II classics at the same time that they got back together for Perfect Strangers, Rainbow from both eras at the same time as Dio and Alcatrazz, the British Invasion and the NWOBHM at exactly the same time. Steely Dan and Venom were both just rock bands to me.

But Lucassen was a decade earlier, so he had less of that to absorb at once, whenever he found the genre, and could focus more on just the new stuff the seventies brought, which started with glam and prog rock and moved on from there. Golden Age of Music explicitly references Radio Caroline and Farrah Fawcett, along with songs or albums by Rainbow, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Jesus Christ Superstar, Alice Cooper and Thin Lizzy. Those are easy references to catch (though I didn't get the "shorts by JCB" line), but other songs are more opaque, maybe because they're hybrids. I thought The Rise of the Starman would be about David Bowie, but it seems more Marc Bolan.

The most telling lyrics arrive in the closer, Came to Mock, Stayed to Rock, in which Lucassen speaks to gatekeeping. He's a rocker, the narrator of this song, who doesn't want anyone to change that, but the ubiquitous they drag him to an Abba show and an opera, both of which he thoroughly digs, against his expectations. However, it ends with suggestions that there's pressure on him to think of those as guilty pleasures and that it's his turn. Can he drag you to one of his shows or are you a little too closed minded for that experience, you Abba and opera fans? He might play this, with its sassy funky intro.

I liked this album from the outset because I love that seventies organ sound and I especially love it when it shows up with twenty-first century production technology. Everything's worth listening to, even if you like Abba and opera, but there are clear standouts. Golden Age of Music is the obvious one, because it's the most effective earworm I've heard in months. I woke up this morning to "This is Radio Caroline. Evening all. Hope you're doing fine" playing inside my skull. I'd call out the other golden song, Golden Boy, too. It's more subtle but it nails its groove, feeling oddly like a Yes track played by Purple. I can't not mention They Took Us by Storm too, which is Sabbath heavy but with a quintessential Purple organ intro, even if it's more Perfect Strangers than Machine Head.

What matters on an album this tailored to nostalgia though is connecting with listeners who share that mindset. I'm just a little too young for that but it worked anyway. If you were born in 1960 and grew up listening to rock music, I'd be interested in how close this comes to taking you back there.

In the mid-sixth century AD a North African writer named Verecundus sat down to compose a Latin poem. Verecundus was a good Christian, indeed a bishop. And his poem was on a good Christian subject, repentance. In its two hundred or so lines he denounces his own sinfulness, describes his sorrow and remorse, appeals to God for forgiveness, and regrets that he was ever born. Toward the close of the piece his thoughts turn to the day of judgment and the end of the world, a vast conflagration in which all things will be consumed:

The myth in the Statesman includes an early example of the motif known as the golden age, which as Star shows is intimately bound up with the apocalypse theme. The metallic term, and its connection to periodic destruction, can already be found in the early Greek poet Hesiod, thought to be a contemporary of Homer. Hesiod had told of a succession of human races, the best and earliest of whom was the golden race. Further metallic generations followed, each destroyed in turn by the gods or their leader, Zeus. In due course Zeus will destroy the present race as well, though Hesiod is stingy with details.

Catastrophism is also a theme for the poets of the Augustan period, and here the golden age comes in once more. It is characteristic of the golden age that it is not here and now. Most often it is placed in the past, before some catastrophe ended it. Adam and Eve enjoyed it in Eden, before the Fall. For the Greeks it took place in the days of Kronos, before his son Zeus overthrew him and ushered in the world we know. It may linger, perhaps, in distant regions, among far-off peoples, at the edges of the earth. But not here.

This fantasy has its conservative counterpart. When the end times come, society will revert to traditional values. Husbands will be providers and wives will know their place. White men who now feel disrespected or unvalued by their fellow citizens will suddenly find themselves important and their skills much in demand. After the world ends, the people in charge will be the people with the guns, free to dispatch fearsome, subhuman Others without consequences.

The book is divided into three parts: past, present, and future. The first section looks at the collapses (or supposed collapses) of three societies: the Maya, the late Roman Empire in the West, and the indigenous peoples of eastern North America after 1492.

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