Golden Bough (mythology)

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(Barcelona) The Golden Bough - Joseph Mallord William Turner - Tate Britain.jpg
Detail of The Golden Bough by J. M. W. Turner (1834)

The Golden Bough is one of the episodes of the Aeneid , an epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil composed between 29 and 19 BC, which narrates the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas after the Trojan War. The episode of the golden bough is found in the sixth book of the Aeneid and concerns Aeneas's journey into the underworld. Scholars following the Harvard School interpretation of the poem consider Virgil's treatment of the myth to reflect his ambivalence around the hero Aeneas and his mission to set in motion the rise of the Roman Empire.

Contents

In Virgil's Aeneid

While Troy was being destroyed in its last battle against the Greeks, Aeneas leaves the city and leads a quest to find a new homeland in the western Mediterranean. [1] Aeneas eventually arrives in Italy where he intends to found a city for his people. Once there, Deiphobe, the Sibyl of Cumae, then an old woman over seven hundred years old, at the Temple of Apollo, consents to escort him on a journey into the underworld to comply with his wish to see the shade of his deceased father. [2]

Before entering the underworld, Deiphobe tells Aeneas he must first bury the musician Misenus, and also obtain the bough of gold which grows nearby in the woods around her cave, which must be given as a gift to Proserpina, the queen of Pluto, king of the underworld. In the woods, Aeneas's mother, the goddess Venus, sends two doves to aid him in this difficult task, and these help him to find the tree. When Aeneas tears off the bough, a second golden bough springs up in its place, as the Sibyl had told him it would. [3]

The Trojans, led by Corynaeus, carry out the funerary rites for Misenus, allowing Aeneas to start his descent into the Underworld. The Sibyl shows the golden bough to Charon, who only then allows them to enter his boat and cross the River Styx. [4] On the other side, she casts a drugged cake to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, who swallows it and falls asleep. [5] Once in the Underworld, Aeneas tries talking to some shades, and listens to the Sibyl speak of places, like Tartarus, where he sees a large prison, fenced by a triple wall, with wicked men being punished, and bordered by the fiery river Phlegethon. At Pluto's palace, Aeneas puts the golden bough on the arched door, and goes through to the Elysian Fields, the abode of those who led just and useful lives. [6]

Interpretation

In the fourth or fifth century CE, the commentator Servius attempted to neutralise ambivalent readings of the episode of the Golden Bough, which is described as cunctantem ('hesitating') as Aeneas attempts to remove it from a tree: this follows the Sibyl's pronouncement that the bough would "come easily of its own accord", if Aeneas's journey were ordained by fate, and therefore may imply that Aeneas is not truly favoured or endorsed by the gods. Thomas argues that Servius's attempts to suppress this interpretation indicate that it was already current by the time of his commentary. [7]

In modern scholarship, such ambivalent readings are characteristic of the Harvard School, a school of thought which attempts to trace pessimistic messages in the Aeneid and sees Aeneas himself as a flawed hero. R. A. Brooks's 1953 article "Discolor aura: Reflections on the Golden Bough", [8] often considered the first work of the Harvard School, [9] argued that previous commentators had neglected the symbolic and suggestive aspects of the Golden Bough episode. [10] Brooks considers it to highlight Aeneas's ignorance of the full implications of his destiny, the distorted and ambiguous nature of Virgil's language, and Aeneas's inability to achieve a final state of success. [11]

Charles Segal, another member of the Harvard School, [12] discusses the discrepancy between the Sibyl's instructions to Aeneas – that the bough will "come easily of its own accord", if Aeneas's journey is ordained by fate – and what occurs when he reaches the bough; the bough momentarily resists him. [13] He suggests that the episode's incidental nature to the plot of the Aeneid, as well as the close proximity between the instructions and the bough's resistance, suggests that Virgil intended the discrepancy and that it is significant to the poem. [14] He sees Aeneas's taking of the bough as "a symbolical anticipation of the rude loss of innocence" that awaits the land of Italy, and more generally indicative of the poem's "divided attitude to the destiny of Rome and the cost of empire". [15]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Clarke 2007, pp. 15–18.
  2. ↑ Stookey 2004, p. 67; Clarke 2007, pp. 42–43.
  3. ↑ Virgil, Aeneid VI, lines 133–148, 183–210.
  4. ↑ Virgil, Aeneid VI, lines 384–416.
  5. ↑ Virgil, Aeneid VI, lines 417–423.
  6. ↑ Stookey 2004, p. 67; Clarke 2007, pp. 47–48.
  7. ↑ Thomas 2001, pp. 99–100.
  8. ↑ Clausen 1995, p. 313; Harrison 2017, p. 77.
  9. ↑ Harrison 1990, p. 6, n. 24.
  10. ↑ Brooks 1953, p. 260.
  11. ↑ Brooks 1953, pp. 278–279.
  12. ↑ O'Hara 2013.
  13. ↑ Segal 1968, p. 75, 77.
  14. ↑ Segal 1968, p. 78.
  15. ↑ Segal 1968, pp. 78–79.

References

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