| 释义 |
silver age
1. The second age of the world, according to the Greek and Roman poets, inferior in simplicity and happiness to the first or golden age.
1565Golding Ovid's Met. i. 131 When..the siluer age came in more somewhat base than golde. 1621G. Sandys Ovid's Met. i. (1632) 3 After Saturne was throwne downe to Hell, Ioue rul'd; and then the Siluer Age befell. 1710W. King Heathen Gods & Heroes x. (1722) 30 In Comparison of the next succeeding and the present Age,..this of Jupiter had no lower Character than that of the Silver Age. 1797Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3) I. 234/2 The silver age commenced when men began to deviate from the paths of virtue. 1860Chambers's Encycl. I. 76/1 Hesiod mentions five Ages—the golden, simple and patriarchal; the silver, voluptuous and godless.
b. The period of Latin literature from the death of Augustus to that of Hadrian.
1736Ainsworth Lat.-Eng. Dict. p. xxx, Tacitus, Pliny the historian, Suetonius, and some other prose writers, flourished in the silver age. 1826Butler Grotius 31 The language of the Pandects is of the silver age. 1859Trench Sel. Gloss. 6 While ‘animosus’ belongs to the best period of Latin literature, ‘animositas’ is of quite the later silver age.
c. A period of Russian literature and art at the beginning of the twentieth century, considered in comparison with the golden era of the mid-nineteenth century.
1965P. Benno in Hayward & Crawley Soviet Lit. in Sixties 179 The works of the generation of Russia's ‘Silver Age’ in the first three decades of the present century. 1974T. P. Whitney tr. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago I. i. ix. 336 Even though the Silver Age of art, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger's water. 1976Times Lit. Suppl. 16 Apr. 450/3 The poet's life in pre-war St Petersburg... She grew up in the capital at a time when its artistic life was at its most febrile and brilliant, the height of the ‘Silver Age’, not only in poetry but in painting, ballet, music.
2. An age marked by the extensive production or use of silver.
1740tr. Barba's Metals & Min. 111 There was very little use or consumption of Quicksilver before the beginning of this new Silver Age of the World. |