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 BCE, 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

The classicist Anthony Ossa-Richardson calls the golden bough "the central detail of the central book of what was, from late antiquity to the end of the Renaissance, the most significant and prestigious work of pagan literature in Western Europe". [7] 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. The classicist Richard F. Thomas argues that Servius's attempts to suppress this interpretation indicate that it was already current by the time of his commentary. [8]

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", [9] often considered the first work of the Harvard School, [10] argued that previous commentators had neglected the symbolic and suggestive aspects of the Golden Bough episode. [11] 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. [12]

Charles Segal, another member of the Harvard School, [13] 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. [14] 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. [15] 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". [16]

Reception

The late antique Christian poet Faltonia Betitia Proba composed the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi , a rearrangement of the Aeneid to tell the story of the life of Christ, in the fourth century CE. In her reformulation, the verses concerning the Golden Bough are repurposed to refer to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis. [17] Proba's approximate contemporary, Servius, interpreted the bough as an allegory of the Pythagorean interpretation of human life, by which the shape of the branch was intended to recall the Y-shaped path Pythagoras considered open to human beings upon coming of age: the choice between a life of vice and one of virtue. Servius also connected the bough to the myth of the Rex Nemorensis, a priesthood of the goddess Diana which was passed on by the killing of the current holder. [18] To challenge the priest for his office, a contender had to break off a branch from the grove of trees around the sanctuary, an act which was otherwise forbidden. [19] In the Christian commentary of Fulgentius, written around 500 CE, the taking of the Golden Bough is interpreted as an allegory for the acquisition of knowledge. [20]

Two medieval groups of Neoplatonist Christian scholars followed Servius in writing allegorical interpretations of the Golden Bough aligned with Platonic thought. One group, based in Chartres (or possibly Paris) in France, was active in the mid-twelfth century. These included Bernardus Silvestris, [21] who concurred with Servius's interpretation of the bough as representing human beings' the Y-shaped moral choice, and added that the image of a tree echoed that of a human body "shady with the heaviness of the flesh". [22] He further argued that the Y-shaped branch was representative of the division of philosophy into its theoretical and practical branches, which were both constitutive of wisdom, represented by the golden nature of the bough. Bernardus's approximate contemporary, John of Salisbury, made a similar argument in which the bough stood for the "virtuous effort" necessary to acquire wisdom. [23]

The second group, based in fifteenth-century Florence, [21] similarly treated the bough as symbolic of philosophical wisdom, making little addition to the interpretation put forward by Servius. These included Coluccio Salutati, Cristoforo Landino and Marsilio Ficino; Ficino interpreted the bough as "the light of reason" granted by divine mercy. [24] Commentaries made on the Aeneid throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including those of Erasmus, Juan Luis de la Cerda, Jacobus Pontanus, Friedrich Taubmann, John Boys and Charles de la Rue, largely followed Servius's approach. [25] An exception was that of Francis Bacon, who saw the taking of the bough as an allegory for the act of harnessing the natural power or life-force Bacon believed to be imprisoned beneath the earth. [26]

In Alexander Ross's 1638 Virgilii evangelisantis christiados libri XIII, a retelling of the Old Testament and the life of Christ in Virgilian Latin, the golden bough is used to stand in for the olive branch given to Noah to indicate the end of the Great Flood. Ross, following the Neoplatonists, also calls the bough "a bough of divine eloquence ... Christ brought us". [27] The French poet Paul Scarron, in his parodic burleseque Virgile traverstie (composed between 1648 and 1649), satirically compared the lustre of the bough with that of the Jacobus or the Louis d'or, respectively English and French gold coins of his era. A similar parody appeared in the 1672 Cataplus of Maurice Atkins, in which the glow of hte bough was compared with that of glow-worms, frost, and "frothy trash which sluggish snail / draws along the ground at tail". [28]

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. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, pp. 341–342.
  8. ↑ Thomas 2001, pp. 99–100.
  9. ↑ Clausen 1995, p. 313; Harrison 2017, p. 77.
  10. ↑ Harrison 1990, p. 6, n. 24.
  11. ↑ Brooks 1953, p. 260.
  12. ↑ Brooks 1953, pp. 278–279.
  13. ↑ O'Hara 2013.
  14. ↑ Segal 1968, p. 75, 77.
  15. ↑ Segal 1968, p. 78.
  16. ↑ Segal 1968, pp. 78–79.
  17. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 342.
  18. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, pp. 345–346.
  19. ↑ Smith 1973, pp. 348–350.
  20. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, pp. 348–349.
  21. 1 2 Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 348.
  22. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 349.
  23. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 350.
  24. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 352.
  25. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 353.
  26. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 354.
  27. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 355.
  28. ↑ Ossa-Richardson 2008, p. 356.

References

Further reading

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