From Servius to Frazer: The Golden Bough and its Transformations

Abstract

For the past 2,000 years, no work of secular Western literature has been so widely read, studied and interpreted as Vergil’s Aeneid. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exegetes of the poem have focused on its sixth book as the source of ancient pagan wisdom; one of the central images in this book is that of the Golden Bough, which Aeneas plucks in order to gain entry into the underworld. This paper discusses the entire history of the Bough’s interpretation, beginning with Servius and culminating with James Frazer; the Bough is used as an index of the rise and decline of allegorical interpretation, and further hermeneutic developments are studied in some detail. Attention is also given to literary reworkings of the Bough, from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. I conclude with a discussion of modern attitudes towards mediaeval interpretations, and an analysis of the continuity of exegetical methods, as reflected in twentieth-century accounts of the Bough’s meaning.