The Golden Bough (mythology) Aeneas tore off the bough, a second golden one immediately sprang up, which was a good omen, as the sibyl had said that if this did not happen the coming endeavor would fail. Soon after they started their descent into the Underworld, the Sibyl showed the golden bough to Charon who only then allowed them to enter his boat and cross the Stygian river. On the other side, she cast a drugged cake to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, who swallowed it and fell asleep. Once in the Underworld, Aeneas tried talking to some shades, and listened to the Sibyl speak
The Dog It Was That Died be seen as the mad dog of the poem. Stoppard may have borrowed the idea to use this quotation from British novelist W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 "The Painted Veil", in which the protagonist's husband, bitter at her infidelity, brought her to cholera-stricken China in hopes that she would take ill and die. When he catches cholera instead, he dies with the quotation "The dog it was that died" on his lips. The words also occur in a speech by Wormold, the lead character in Graham Greene's 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana" – also an entertaining tale of Cold War