Golden Bough

Biography

The Golden Bough is a fantastical object described in the Aeneid, an epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil composed between 29 and 19 BC narrating the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas after the Trojan War. The episode of the Golden Bough is found in its sixth book and is part of Aeneas's journey into the Underworld. The bough itself acts as proof of Aeneas's divine favour, and allows him to pass into the Underworld. He is directed to find it in an expansive forest, which he accomplishes with the aid of his mother, the goddess Venus, and to remove it from its host tree. Although Aeneas has been told that it will come easily – if his journey is ordained by fate – Virgil describes the bough as briefly hesitating before he takes it. Virgil's portrayal of the bough has no direct literary antecedents, though it draws on several precedents from literature, folklore and philosophy. Scholars have connected it with, among others, the Golden Fleece in the story of the Argonauts; symbolic objects associated with deities such as Hermes, Dionysus and Circe; and the branches carried by prospective initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries, a Greek religious rite centred on a symbolic journey into the Underworld. Virgil associates it with both death and immortality, partly by way of symbolic associations in Graeco-Roman culture between gold and the gods. It also recalls ideas put forth by the Roman philosopher Lucretius as to the nature of the soul. The episode of the Golden Bough was parodied by authors including Virgil's contemporary Ovid, and drawn upon by later Roman poets including Lucan and Valerius Flaccus. Early interpretations of the Golden Bough tended to give it an allegorical function, particularly via Pythagorean and Neoplatonist philosophy, which viewed it as symbolic of the choice between virtue and vice. Medieval commentators often considered it a symbol of wisdom, and several Christian theologians interpreted it as representing Christian wisdom and virtue. In the si

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