Dante's search for the Golden Age

"The myth of the Golden Age and all the elements that are associated with it play a very important role in Dante's scheme to restore justice to a fallen world. The figure of Saturn, as King of the Golden Age and as the planet of the contemplatives, symbol of castration and sterility, loss and exile, struck a responsive chord in Dante's imagination. The myth of the Golden Age provided him with a simple and yet very wide-ranging structure into which he could lay out his master plan for humanity. The very few elements of the myth, the Virgin Iustitia who reigned along with Saturn and the all-powerful avarice that drove her away, become for the poet protagonists in struggle for the salvation of his soul and of that of humanity. The Divine Comedy can be considered on the simplest level a struggle to achieve Justice in a world corrupted by Avarice. The struggle is enacted in many ways and with different characters, but the substance of the fight does not change. On one side, the forces of cupiditas are embodied by the She-Wolf, the Medusa and the Siren; on the opposite side Dante fields such messengers of Grace as the Messo celeste of Canto IX of the Inferno, the "donna santa e presta" of Purgatorio XIX, and then Matelda of the Earthly Paradise as a pre-figuration of Beatrice"--P. [4] of cover.