The Return of the Golden Age from Antiquity to the 21st Century: Receptions of a Classical Motif

This book represents the first reception history of the classical myth of the “Golden Age” from Antiquity up until the present. The introduction proposes “Golden Age thinking” as a set of connected ideas about the flexible organization of time, morality and divine interventions. The case-studies reveal the different ways this has been and still is being used to promote a particular vision of the future by connecting it to an idealized vision of a lost past. Together they offer a toolkit for understanding this motif’s enduring power, and reconstruct the trajectory during which Greco-Roman antiquity, from being the origin of the Golden Age myth, was transformed into a kind of Golden Age itself.