<span>The age of Augustus is from 43 BC to AD 18 and it is called as golden age of roman literature because the age reached its highest literary expression in poetry, a polished and sophisticated verse generally addressed to a patron or to the emperor Augustus and dealing with themes of patriotism, love, and nature.
During 29 BC to 19 BC, Livy began his monumental history of Rome, and another historian, Pollio, was writing his important but lost history of recent events. Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses, a mythological history of the world from the creation to the Augustan Age, was the last great writer of the Golden Age.</span>
Most likely irony. Paradise is usually instilled in peoples' minds as somewhere refreshing and heavenly, and the next couple of words say "ahead of them is an empty oil-covered beach" which clearly objects with the paradise statement.
