On the Bougonia

In chapter 1 I treated the image of bougonia in terms, first, of its unreality and, second, of its dynamics as a process. This is important because the dynamics of the process of bougonia contribute to its ultimate symbolic value in the poem. To review my earlier arguments, we must not assume that the ancients, without ever having witnessed or practiced bougonia, believed uncritically in its reality. Rather it occasioned scepticism among them, as may be seen in Varro (3.16.4, 37–38) and Columella (9.14.6). Further, several features of the poet's telling of the tale suggest that he intends the reader to be distanced from and doubtful about it. These include an unusually impersonal style ("a place is chosen," "they enclose it" 4.29 5ff.); the setting of the tale in a distant country from which there is only hearsay; and the representation of the tale as fama (286, 318), thus unverified, something of which neither he nor his compatriots had experience. The poet would, then, be only repeating a story told by others, which he himself declines to authenticate. Of the bougonia he does not assert masterfully "I sing" (cano )^[4] but rather, at this point alone in the poem, asks the Muses to tell him what to sing (4.315).

The unreality of bougonia relates to the second important point about it, namely, its symbolic value. While a common view is that bougonia signifies resurrection and a positive future for Rome, the dynamics of bougonia, as the ancients appear to have understood them, do not seem to support this interpretation. Bougonia was not, as scholars have inferred, thought to bring about rebirth or resurrection from death to life but rather an exchange of death and life, since the soul of the slain calf is required in order to animate the new bees. Further, in Aristaeus' case, new bees are indeed born, but they are not re born, as there is no regeneration of the bees that he had previously lost. These remain irretrievable. As a symbol, therefore, the process of bougonia embodies the ambiguous qualities of Iron Age culture in this poem—characteristically aggressive, destructive, and neg-

ligent of cost. The effect of crediting Aristaeus, a culture hero, with this suspect and distasteful process of contriving life out of death is to comment, if obliquely, on the particular quality or character of the culture that he is made to epitomize. In emotional tension with Aristaeus stand the figures of the Georgic poet, the Corycian gardener, Orpheus, Proteus, Eurydice, and the nightingale (4.511–15), all of whom have—variously—sentiment, appreciation of beauty, or capacity for sorrow and pity.

In this chapter the central importance of bougonia is its relationship to the tension between the farmer's and the poet's knowledge and truth. Through the paradox of being unreal but true, bougonia as symbol suggests the limitations of the materially real, as embodied in praecepta, and consequently the higher value of the poet's truth as it is revealed in myth and mystery. Here the effect is to clarify the distinction between the farmer's and the poet's truth, and, in some sense, to validate the latter. The material truth of profit and productivity is ultimately less urgent than poetic truth. The significance of bougonia, then, is critical for the entire poem, not only as a representation of the quality of Iron Age culture but also as a demonstration of the limitations of the useful and material and of the transcendent nature of the poet's truth and value. This is the essential vision of the poem.