I was intrigued by a footnote in Stephen Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext regarding the post-antique designation of early imperial literature as ‘silver’–namely, how long this designation has been around, which according to the OED goes back at least to 1736 (p. 83 n. 66).
So I went to the OED entry for ‘silver age’. The first meaning is the mythical one: ‘The second age of the world, according to the Greek and Roman poets, inferior in simplicity and happiness to the first or golden age.’
Definition 1.b is the literary meaning: ‘The period of Latin literature from the death of Augustus to that of Hadrian.’ And indeed, the first use is from 1736, where Ainsworth writes: ‘Tacitus, Pliny the historian, Suetonius, and some other prose writers, flourished in the silver age.’ The next use comes in Charles Butler’s Life of Hugo Grotius:’The language of the Pandects is of the silver age.’
What I find most interesting is the way in which a term used to describe a mythical period in ancient literature (cf. subiit argentea proles, Ovid Met.1.114) has made its way into English as a literary-historical term to describe the actual poetry (and prose) of certain ancient writers. Huh.