208 



DISCOVERY 



treatment of diseases due to infection by recognised 

 bacteria. 



R. J. V. P. 



An article which readers are well advised to refer to in con- 

 junction with the above notes is " Immunity in Infectious 

 Diseases," by Professor A. E. Boycott, Discovery for March 

 1922, p. 66. 



New Light on Old Authors 



V. Where was Vergil Born ? 



By R. S. Conway, Litt.D., F.B.A. 



Hulme Professor 0/ Lnlin in Ihc Universilij nf Manchester 



" Why, at Mantua," most school-boys would answer, 

 if they saw the question in this title. And they 

 would be right. But when they reflected that his 

 father was a farmer, that Mantua was a town, and 

 that a farm, especially a large one, cannot very well 

 exist on ground occupied by bricks and mortar, they 

 would see that their answer did not go far enough. 

 They would realise this still more if they had learnt 

 that the whole suiface of ancient Italy was divided 

 into what we should call " townships," although the 

 actual towns were often as much as fifty miles or more 

 apart. For instance, a glance at the map (Fig. i) shows 

 that more than one of the four towns, Brescia, Verona, 

 Cremona, and Mantua, however the area of the quadri- 

 lateral of which they made the corners may have 

 been divided, must have reckoned as its own a good 

 deal of land which was many miles removed from its 

 centre. 



The point, then, of the question which we are 

 asking is this : in what part of the country round 

 about Mantua did Vergil live ? This would not 

 matter very much if the districts on all sides of Mantua 

 were alike. But since, as we shall see, there are great 

 differences in the nature of the country, the actual 

 situation of Andes, which was the name of Vergil's 

 village, probably did matter a good deal to \'ergil 

 himself. After all, most people would have a rather 

 different outlook on life if they lived in sight of Snowdon 

 from that which they might have if they lived in the 

 Fens of the Eastern Counties. 



The Traditional Site 



But perhaps some readers of this article may be 

 prepared to say more than a school-boy would, and 

 may reply that they know, or possibly even that 

 they have visited, a site which is commonly believed 

 in Italy to be that of the ancient Andes, namely a 



little hamlet called Pietole about two English miles | 

 S.E. of Mantua. If they have been there, they will i 

 no doubt have seen the handsome monument erected j 

 to Vergil's memory some years ago on that spot ; and ■ 

 they will understand the feeling of a living citizen of ' 

 Mantua who, when he read in the Milanese papers last 

 winter some account of the discovery with which this 

 article is concerned, wrote to his local journal in Mantua 

 denouncing the follies cf wandering professors who 

 would leave no well-known doctrine undisturbed, and 

 concluding pathetically with the remark that he had 

 been Chairman of the Committee which had erected 

 that monument and so of course he must know ! 

 There is this much to be said for him, that the tradi- 

 tion which places Andes in Pietole has prevailed in 

 Italy ever since the time of Dante, who in one passage 

 shows that he believed it ; but it has been frequently 

 questioned, and of late years more and more doubted, 

 by scholars outside Italy. It would take too long to 

 examine what little ground there may have been for 

 such a tradition ; all that can here be said is that 

 the evidence, though it was enough to give rise to a 

 popular notion that Pietole was the site, was far from 

 being enough to justify it.' 



Why is the Tradition Wrong ? 



But perhaps the reader may say, even if he is 

 interested in Vergil's poetry, that after all, wherever 

 Vergil lived, it is rather late in the day for us to trouble 

 about it. Why should we not be content to enjoy 

 his poetry without wanting to inquire more precisely 

 where he was born ? The answer is that if we accept 

 the tradition which places his home in Pietole, we 

 have not only to disregard his best biographer— a 

 scholar called Probus, who lived in the first century 

 A.D. and who tells us that Andes was thirty Roman 

 miles, that is twenty-eight English miles, from Mantua 

 — but also to make a considerable part of Vergil's 

 own poetry, and that the part which tells us most 

 about his own experience, quite unintelligible. For 

 we have then to suppose, as we shall soon see, that 

 when he described his own home, he wrote many lines 

 of mere nonsense, to call it by no harsher name. 



The Background of the Eclogues 



This indeed the commentators admit. One of the 

 best of them tells us that the neighbourhood of Mantua 



1 The evidence consists only of a copy of a fragmentary 

 inscription which, if it ever existed, must have been put up 

 in honour of some member of the Vergilian family. Mommsen 

 thought that the inscription was a forgery. But as the stone, 

 if it existed, has entirely disappeared, it is difficult to say 

 whether he was right ; and even if he was wrong, we have 

 no m;ans of telling whether the date at which the inscription 

 was set up was near the time of Vergil. 



