Elia Marinova
THE FIFTH GENERATION:
VIVO INDIGNANS
Elia Marinova
The most important intuition of Renaissance people is the understanding of
time as a loss. The purpose of this article is to inquire into the late post-history
of the ancient myth of the five (or four) generations. We have studied various
specific forms which the familiar story can assume in Renaissance texts. Our
concern is mainly with the Renaissance Latin poetry - Petrarca's verse letters or
the Silvae of Angelo Poliziano, the humanistic critics of history and literature -
so the treatises of Jean Bodin and Julius Caesar Scaliger - and the Renaissance
comments on the relevant passages in Hesiod's Works and Days and Ovid's
Metamorphoses. All these texts are remarkable for the ingenuity of their
answers concerning the human fate and the succession of ages of world history
as a steady decay or as a progress.