Plato's myth of the statesman, the ambiguities of the Golden Age and of history

Abstract

In the treatise de Abstinentia that the neoplatonist Porphyry devoted to justifying abstention from foods of animal origin, there is a long quotation from Life in Greece ( βίος τῆς Έλλάδος ) by the Peripatetic, Dicaearchus (end of the fourth century B.C.), who was a direct disciple of Aristotle. This book is known to represent a sort of cultural history of Greek humanity from the very earliest times. In its essentials, this text tells us that the Golden Age, or age of Cronos, referred to by the poets, principally by Hesiod, in his Works and Days (from which Dicaearchus quotes verses 116–19: ‘And they had all good things, the grain-bearing earth, ζείδωρος ἂρονρα , itself produced an abundant and generous harvest, and they lived off their fields in peace and joy, amidst countless boons…’), that this marvellous epoch was perhaps a historical reality