Was there a best time to be alive? These are the pitfalls of looking back for a nostalgic ‘golden age’

It has always been human nature to look at the civilisations of the past through rose-tinted glasses, driven by nostalgia and a need to impose a sense of order to the complexity of history. But, asks Robert Blackmore, can any age truly be considered golden? In the beginning, life was perfect. That, at least, was what our ancient antecedents believed. In c700 BC, mirroring the biblical Eden, the Greek poet Hesiod told how people “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote from toil and grief”. Some seven centuries later, Hesiod’s Roman successor Ovid recounted in hisMetamorphoseshow “the formation of man is followed by a succession of the four ages of the world. The first is the golden age, during which innocence and justice alone govern.” Were Hesiod and Ovid on to something? Was the dawn of humanity the best time to be alive? Historians rarely agree on anything, least of all whether things were going well for people in a past society. Were they good or bad times? Were they getting better or worse? Politicians and journalists frame the present in these terms. We, too, sense the ups and downs of our own lives. But can this apply to history? Should historians assess an age in the same way? Some might flat-out reject value judgments and insist we only appraise a time by its own standards. Culturally at least, this works. Yet the increase of interest in social and economic history since the mid-20th century has made discussion of the relative prosperity of past societies more relevant than it had been with, for example, constitutional history. Furthermore, such questions seem especially crucial to public history. We want to understand the differences and similarities between our lives and those who came before. History is, more than anything, about understanding change. Then there’s the problem of what we mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ times. How do we define ‘prosperity’? This depends on your priorities, but little could be more important than basic material living standards. How well were people fed, clothed and housed? How robust was their health and security? Of course, beyond modest survival, quality of life is a far harder thing to articulate, both in a material and immaterial sense. In history, as today, little is so hard to measure as happiness. But, from the start – even in elementary terms – our estimations of good or bad times are frustratingly at odds. The Neolithic Revolution (beginning c10,000 BC), the gradual adoption of sedentary agriculture by formerly hunter-gatherer societies, was once presented as a positive step forward. In the long run, it was what allowed humanity to create ‘civilisation’ – that is to say, complex, densely populated societies with cities, governments, bureaucracies and armies supposedly representing shelter, safety and comfort. This was, surely, an improvement on what came before, if life had previously been, as the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In the next century, however, another thinker, the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famously considered such a “state of nature” superior. Akin to Hesiod and Ovid, Rousseau saw the deep past as a golden age corrupted by all that came after it. This was a view significantly advanced in the 1960s by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose ‘Original Affluent Society’ of hunter-gatherers ate better and had more leisure time than we do today. Yet many researchers have since confirmed that many such societies could also be extraordinarily violent ‒ both between and within groups ‒ with the killing of children and the elderly widely practised. In 1798, the English scholar and Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus presented a stark vision of life that seemed to explain this conflict. In his view, the production of resources was limited by the availability of land, so could only increase incrementally. But population sizes tend to rise exponentially, meaning societies would always experience poverty and are “condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery” as they repeatedly reached the carrying capacity of their environments. A Malthusian interpretation of the past requires acceptance of uncomfortable ideas. Not least, that events that lowered the population – such as disease and violence – might have been good in history, that the pain and suffering we seek to avoid, might have been necessary. When the dust settled, it is argued, the survivors ended up with more resources per person. But is this really the whole story? Aside from the obvious advantages to those concerned of not being dead, surely there are broader benefits to having more people. A larger group might compete more successfully against smaller ones for resources. It might win wars and expand further. But, most importantly, it might not all be a zero-sum game. More people generally meant more collective intelligence, and so more creativity, innovation and, eventually, technological breakthroughs. Some argue that the very size of the human population is itself directly linked to the complexity of human societies. Time and again, we find differing perspectives. The subjectivity of historians themselves is problematic, and we European historians often tend to offer an overly Eurocentric perspective. Our predecessors during the colonial era used to admire classical civilisations such as theRoman empireas model societies to be emulated. In the late 18th century, the British historian Edward Gibbon considered the years AD 96‒180 to have been ancient Rome’s golden age. It was there and then, he said, that “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Some of Rome’s achievements are manifest in its surviving art, architecture and literature ‒ if those are your measures. Yet, archaeological evidence from skeletal remains suggests the average standard of living in the empire was lowest precisely when it was most successful, during thePax Romana, the ‘Roman Peace’. Life was probably far better in the empire’s western half after its ‘fall’ in the fifth century AD, during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. One 2021 study showed that people in Roman Gaul were shorter, and their bones presented more signs of physiological stress, than in the post-Roman period ‒ the result of more exposure to disease in childhood and overcrowded urban living. At issue here is clearly also inequality: it mattered who you were. In complex hierarchical societies, elites could dominate resource extraction and distribution and so raise their level of prosperity well above non-elites, whose material existence remained barely above subsistence. In Europe, for example, you nearly always did better if you were rich, white, free and a man ‒ as Gibbon was. Almost all surviving Roman archaeological sites, fromPompeiito Palmyra, provide ample evidence of how well the empire’s aristocracy and provincial elites lived. But for many, not least Rome’s vast enslaved workforce, life would hardly have been so “happy and prosperous”. Yet with inequality arose cycles in the relative prosperity of different groups when populations rose and fell. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the so-called ‘crisis’ of the late Middle Ages in Europe, roughly 1300 to 1500. The preceding centuries saw considerable economic growth, an expansion in population, and, with it, spectacular architecture ‒ such as Romanesque andGothic cathedrals‒ as well as a great revival of art, philosophy and literature. Subsequently, in the 14th century, came a series of disasters. First there was the Great Famine of 1315–17/22; then, from the 1347–51Black Deathpandemic, repeated waves of plague. These struck alongside near constant warfare, not least theHundred Years’ War(1337–1453) between England and France. A Distant Mirror, American historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 account of this period, is famously subtitled ‘the Calamitous 14th Century’. This leaves little doubt as to her assessment. Neverthel