The belief in a golden age of the past had come from several sources: from Hesiodic genealogies of gods and “heroes,” from an early naïve faith in the actuality of Homeric descriptions, from the tendency of parents to contrast the morals of a new generation with the refurbished and selected memories of their youth, and from the utopian pictures of romances conveniently placed in the far away and long-ago. All these things and others begot the “golden age” of Chronos’ day. The Romans had found such tales plausible. They too had a splendid tradition of ancestral heroes who had undoubtedly possessed the sterling qualities of a simple puritan-agrarian primitivism—capacity to endure hardship and pain, family devotion, loyalty, and abstinence—that later Romans admired but too often missed in contemporary life. In their conquests of the world they had come into contact with many uncivilized peoples and had had occasion to note these very qualities in all unadvanced peoples.[7] They had evidence in the ruins of the decayed villages of Latium that the soil no longer bore the population it once had, and the conclusion was ready at hand, as Lucretius himself points out, that mother earth was not so fruitful as she had been in her youth. Furthermore, when they happened upon the tombs of the prehistoric age,[8] especially the vaults of Etruscan princes, they found in many of them the lavish furniture of gold and silver and bronze-ware that led them to accept the Hesiodic chronology—doubtless based in part on similar observations in Boeotia—of a seeming succession of gold, silver, bronze, and iron periods. Accordingly, there were reasons enough for accepting the well-known utopian fancies of the Greek poets. Lucretius himself did not wholly free himself of these beliefs. The Ennian portraits of the ancient heroes, and the description of primitive simplicity appealed strongly to him. He did not think that the Romans he had seen in the days of the Sullan massacres and the Catilinarian conspiracy were the moral equals of those of an earlier day. In point of fact they were not. There had been a noticeable decline. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the theory of evolution which he adopted made it possible for him to observe that in some respects civilization had actually meant progress, that in the arts, in the domain of thought, in the institutions of government and law there had been a real advance. In his fifth book[9] he remarks in an intimate note that betrays his own personal observations: Wherefore even now some arts are receiving their last polish, some are even in course of growth: just now many improvements have been made in ships; only yesterday musicians have given birth to tuneful melodies; then too this nature or system of things has been discovered lately, and I the very first of all have only now been found able to transfer it into native words.