DISCOVERY 



119 



since it has worn more than one look to the distinguished 

 author himself ; for latterly ^ he seems to have 

 modified the particular theory, which he had in part 

 taken over from some ancient mythologist, connecting 

 Vergil's golden branch with the weird custom of the 

 runaway' priest or " king " {rex nemorensis) of Diana's 

 grove at Nemi. This person, always a runaway 

 slave, became " King of the Forest " by slaying his 

 predecessor, and remained king until he failed to 

 defend himself against some new aspirant : 



" The priest who slew the slayer 

 And shall himself be slain " — 



so Macaulay described him. 



Instead of regarding the King of the Forest as the 

 Vegetable-God incarnate, who has to be sacrificed- as 

 soon as another candidate for godship who can boast 

 a larger portion of Vegetable-Spirit (i.e. of physical 

 strength) appears in the neighbourhood. Sir James 

 later on counted him as a survival of the reUgious side 

 of the kingship of some tribe, whose name is not 

 recorded, but who, for some reason or other, dumped 

 their King-Spiritual into the somewhat depressing 

 surroundings of Diana's temple at Nemi, just twenty- 

 live miles from Rome, with no one to see that the rules 

 of his sacred game were kept, and went off to some 

 region, also not recorded, with their King-Secular to 

 conduct their public business for them without having 

 to worry himself any further about oaken boughs and 

 godships and murderous rivals. 



The result is that poor ^neas was left rather in a 

 mist. We know that he plucked a golden branch, that 

 he carried it with him to the Underworld, and that he 

 fixed it on the door of the infernal palace of Queen 

 Proserpine, the bride of " dusky Dis." But why 

 .(Eneas did all this Sir James Frazer does not seem to 

 tell us so confidently as before ; 3'et he would still 

 like us to think of the branch as embodying the life 

 of the Oak-tree — though it was a holm-oak (ilex), not 

 an oak {qtiercus), on which ^Eneas found it ; and though 

 it is likened by Vergil to a mistletoe " alien to the tree 

 on which it is growing." For all that, most of us will 

 gladl}' beUeve all that Sir James can tell us about 

 oaks — at least, short of identifying the quercus and 

 the ilex ; but aU the oaks of the forest bring us no 

 nearer to Charon or Proserpine. On the contrary, 

 as Sir James (following Dr. A. B. Cook ' and Dr 



I See, forinstance, his Lectures on the Early History of the King. 

 ship (1905), p. 25, where he writes of a statement of Servius ; 

 " I greatly regret that in former editions I missed its signifi- 

 cance entirely." Or the preface to Balder the Beautiful (1913). 

 where he speaks of the runaway priest of Xemi as a " puppet 

 which has served his purpose and may now be put into the 

 lumber-room. 



- See Golden Bough, Edition i (1890), c. 3. 



' Zeus, Jupiter, and the Oak, Cambridge, 1920. 



Warde Fowler*) most justly insists, they point us up 

 to Jupiter, the god of heaven. 



Nor can the latest and most learned of commen- 

 tators on the Sixth Book of the Mneid, the great 

 Berlin scholar, Eduard Norden, find a word of explana- 

 tion to offer, beyond the conjecture that VergU must 

 be following some piece of folk-lore unknown" to us. 

 Is there, I wonder, any other incident in the whole 

 range of ancient story which is, in itself, so fascinating 

 and romantic, so arresting even to a child's imagina- 

 tion, about which so absolutely nothing is yet known ? 



After this the reader will not expect in this article 

 any complete theory of Vergil's motive for devising 

 the incident or for giving it so central a position in 

 his story. But there is, I believe, one avenue of inter- 

 pretation which has not been sought. And j-et to 

 most of us it is far the most important of all lines 

 for search, even though it may not be very satisfying 

 to those who study Folk-lore for its own high scientific 

 sake. I mean the question whether in Vergil's own 

 poem there are any indications of the kind of ideas 

 with which this picturesque detail was Unked in his 

 mind. Whether, in other words, Vergil had, even in 

 part or at times, any thought of an allegorical meaning 

 beyond the plain value of the Branch as helping the 

 movement of the story ; and, if so, what that allegorical 

 notion may have been. 



No one can be confident that Vergil would have 

 been willing to answer such questions if we had put 

 them to him. He might have told us that we could 

 read the story for ourselves ; that we were welcome 

 to profit by anything we found in it ; but that he 

 could not put his story into prose, not even the prose 

 of Philosophv, because that would destroy it. He 

 might even ask us in our turn whether we did not like 

 the Golden Branch where .Eneas plucked it, and 

 where .Eneas left it ; whether we did not think that 

 it was in place in either case ; whether we thought 

 there could have been such a story without it. All 

 this, Master Vergil, as Roger Ascham no doubt called 

 him. might fairly ask us, and we could only answer 

 each question in one wax. 



Nevertheless, readers of poetry, though they may 

 not want the poetry altered by a single scene or 

 word, have after aU a right to try and translate it 

 into their own hvimble prose ; and, indeed, if they do 

 not attempt such a translation, they can never be 

 quite sure that they have reached the meaning which 

 it really carries. A poet may and must put his sug- 

 gestions into pictures. But his readers will always 

 ask what the picture means. And if we find that a 



* Roman Essays and Interpretations, Oxford, 1919. 



5 Reasons which have nothing to do with Nemi or its priest 

 were suggested by Sir James Frazer in the second edition of 

 his Golden Bough, iii. 405, footnote 5. 



