CCLIV and CCLV: Metamorphoses 1:4

Impiety:

Then Jupiter brought in a silver age,

and sent off Saturn into Tartarus.

If that’s what grieved earth’s gilder, that same rage

was born as well inside of all of us.

For brass came after this, and man was prone

to war and warfare’s rash economy.

But only iron men are left alone

with our invention of impiety.

Could it be something in the way we look?

No, not how we appear, but how we see?

The heavens, long ago, our necks forsook—

we want the earth and every sweeping sea.

These necks were made for heaven. Are we sure

that this is how these bones meant to mature?

~~~

Astraea:

Whatever. We have murdered off our gods.

And now their endless eyes peer from the sky.

To pass the time, we dig myriad sods,

and look for what will, war and weapons, buy.

So, one by one, the Good Ones left for good,

while we bend earthward still, impressing none.

Ours is a poor, pathetic neighborhood

who have, for all our gold, no glories won.

Astraea! Dear Astraea, I know why

you had to leave us, last of all who left;

but don’t let your devotion dim nor dry,

don’t leave us here forevermore bereft!

A star leave us in heaven when you leave,

our necks to bend to, if we grow to grieve.

~~~

Metamorphoses I:134-156:

“Afterwards (Saturn being driven into the shady realms of Tartarus), the world was under the sway of Jupiter; then the Silver Age succeeded, inferior to that of gold, but more precious than that of yellow brass. Jupiter shortened the duration of the former spring, and divided the year into four periods by means of winters, and summers, and unsteady autumns, and short springs. Then, for the first time, did the parched air glow with sultry heat, and the ice, bound up by the winds, was pendant. Then, for the first time, did men enter houses; those houses were caverns, and thick shrubs, and twigs fastened together with bark. Then, for the first time, were the seeds of Ceres buried in long furrows, and the oxen groaned, pressed by the yoke of the ploughshare.

The Age of Brass succeeded, as the third in order, after these; fiercer in disposition, and more prone to horrible warfare, but yet free from impiety. The last Age was of hard iron. Immediately every species of crime burst forth, in this age of degenerated tendencies; modesty, truth, and honor took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition. The sailor now spread his sails to the winds, and with these, as yet, he was but little acquainted; and the trees, which had long stood on the lofty mountains, now, as ships bounded through the unknown waves. The ground, too, hitherto common as the light of the sun and the breezes, the cautious measurer marked out with his lengthened boundary.

And not only was the rich soil required to furnish corn and due sustenance, but men even descended into the entrails of the Earth; and riches were dug up, the incentives to vice, which the Earth had hidden, and had removed to the Stygian shades. Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then War came forth, that fights through the means of both, and that brandishes in his blood-stained hands the clattering arms. Men live by rapine; the guest is not safe from his entertainer, nor the father-in-law from the son-in-law; good feeling, too, between brothers is a rarity. The husband is eager for the death of the wife, she for that of her husband. Horrible stepmothers then mingle the ghastly wolfsbane; the son prematurely makes inquiry into the years of his father. Piety lies vanquished, and the virgin Astræa is the last of the heavenly Deities to abandon the Earth, now drenched in slaughter.”