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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
We may now consider this ancient evidence that Andes lay three miles away from Mantua in connection with Conway's remaining arguments and with Virgil's ‘own statement’ in his Bucolics.
In the matter of the inscriptions, Conway's ‘impenitence’ does nothing to strengthen his case. All the points that he raises in an apparent refutation had been met by me. I had distinguished between public and private inscriptions, as Conway had not done in his earlier article, where he declared the period of the two monuments to be ‘Virgil's own,’ the inscriptions being ‘cut in the style which marks the best work between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50.’ I had not, as he asserts, failed to notice the point that caps the climax of his recent article, that ‘the P. Magius who wrote the inscription of Casalpoglio … was related to Virgil's mother.’ I was inclined to date both inscriptions, with the approval of Professor Egbert, somewhere in the third quarter of the first century of our era, but ‘even allowing for them both a date as early as the end of the first century B.C.,’ which is apparently as far back as Conway means to stretch their date, I clamored for an inscription of the time of Virgil's birth if it were to serve as evidence for his birthplace. This point is not met by Conway. If Virgil was born at Pietole, his fame and his family could certainly have extended as far north as Casalpoglio and Calvisano at the time of his death in 19 B.C. Supposing that we knew on other evidence that he was born at Calvisano, the presence of an inscription with the name of Magius or Vergilius would corroborate that evidence.
page 65 note 1 See In Quest of Virgil's Birthplace, p. 75.
page 65 note 2 Op. cit., pp. 95 sqq.
page 65 note 3 P. 100.
page 65 note 4 Harv. Lect., pp. 21–22.
page 65 note 5 P. 76.
page 65 note 6 On p. 95 I said: ‘This inscription contains the name of Publius Magius, a member of the family of Virgil's mother’.
page 65 note 7 P. 162, n. 63.
page 65 note 8 P. 75. He leaves it ‘with complete confidence’ to the judgment of epigraphists to say whether the inscriptions can be plausibly assigned to any date later than A.D. 50 and whether a date B.C. is not far more likely. One competent epigraphist, Professor Egbert, has spoken. Perhaps others will disagree with his estimate. But I shall be greatly surprised, and wholesomely admonished, if the weight of authority favours a date as early as 70 (or 50) B.C.
page 65 note 9 Op. cit., p. 100.
page 65 note 10 See my statement on p. 105.
page 65 note 11 P. 71.
page 66 note 1 Travaux de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l' Université de Bruxelles, I., 1930Google Scholar.
page 66 note 2 III. I: Dic mini, Damoeta, cuium pecus, an Meliboei? III. 3: Infelix o semper, oues, pecus! I. 74: ite meae, felix quondam pecus, ite capellae. Cf. Herrmann, , op. cit., p. 13Google Scholar.
page 66 note 3 II. 52: castaneasque nuces, mea quas Amaryllis amabat.
page 67 note 1 I. 81: castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis. I forget whether Herrmann has noted that the word comes in exactly the same place in the verse in Ecl. II. 52. Q.E.D.
page 67 note 2 Op. cit., p. 142.
page 67 note 3 P. 144.
page 67 note 4 Carm. III. 27, though I confess I cannot see the joke.
page 67 note 5 P. 145.
page 67 note 6 Loc. cit..
page 67 note 7 Suet, . Nero 3Google Scholar.
page 67 note 8 Suet, . Gram. 16Google Scholar.
page 68 note 1 L. 39.
page 68 note 2 Vita Donati, ed. Brummer, , op. citt., P. 10, l. 180Google Scholar.
page 68 note 3 P. 107.
page 68 note 4 IV. 116–148.
page 68 note 5 P. 67.
page 69 note 1 On this point see The Magical Art of Virgil, pp. 160–162. I would here apologize to Conway for misconceiving his views on the local elementin the Bucolics. I am glad to find (p. 66) that not all the topics discussed in Eclogues with odd numbers were restricted to North Italy.
page 69 note 2 P. 67.
page 69 note 3 IX. 7: Certe equidem audieram, qua se subducerecolles | incipiunt mollique iugum demittere cliuo, | usque ad aquam et ueteres, iam fracta cacumina, fagos, | omnia carminibus uestrum seruasse Menalcan.
page 69 note 4 See op. cit., pp. 113 sqq.
page 69 note 5 Ibid., with notes 74 and 75, which quote Servius, on Ecl. IX. 7 and 10Google Scholar. Conway asserts (p. 68, note 1) that these passages in Servius are not so clear as I make them out, and that I disregarded his note on pp. 19, footnote, and 33–34. I had studied both places in his article carefully, but had not called attention to them, finding the obscurity there rather than in Servius. He also explains (p. 68, note 1) that his reason for not citing the alternate interpretation of Servius (aut Vergilii tantum agrum, aut totius Mantuae esse descriptum) was because it did not seem ‘to contribute anything to our knowledge’. He finds the note vestrum menalcan: ‘id est uestrum Vergilium cuius causa agri Mantuanis redditi sunt’ obscure because if Servius meant ‘omnis ager’ he ought not to have said merely agri. But the statement ‘the Mantuans had their estate restored’ seems general enough, especially with agrum…totius Mantuae in the note immediately preceding, Conway adds that if Servius did mean that, then he is wrong, since we know from the passage in the Georgics (II. 128), which I later quoted, that Mantua did lose some land after all. But Servius's comment is pointed at the situationin the Ninth Eclogue, not at the ultimate event, Menalcas had apparently saved omnia carminibus (whether omnia means all of Virgil's farm or all the Mantuan territory), but now the new injustice had been wrought and Moeris driven from his master's estate. Again it is Conway, not Servius, who confuses the account.
page 70 note 1 Conway criticizes as ‘vague and quite undocumented’ the statement of Nardi that before the operations of Pitentino the only lagoon was to the south-east of Mantua, (Giov. d. Virg., p. 109)Google Scholar. He will find plenty of documentation in the revised edition of this work translated by Mrs. Rand, pp. 130 sq.
page 70 note 2 P. 66.
page 70 note 3 One of Conway's remarks (ibid.) I fail to understand. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘that Vergil himself, as a small boy, went to school at Cremona (not at Mantua), and this is less likely to have happened if his home was east of Mantua than if it lay somewhere west of it, on the Cremona side’. Just why ? Did he trudge to and from school every day? If so, I will admit that he had some distance to go from Pietole, some twenty-three miles away. But it was not much better at Carpenedolo, as he started off ‘with shining, morning face’ for a tramp of nearly seventeen miles from farm to schoolroom. I had always supposed that Virgil lived in Cremona, whether with his family or not, during his early schooldays. (Brummer, , Vitae Vergilianae, p. 2Google Scholar: initia aetatis Cremonae egit usque ad virilem togam.) I confess I do not get Conway's meaning.
page 70 note 4 Op. cit., p. 78.
page 70 note 5 I. 46: Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt | et tibi magna satis, quamuis lapis omnia nudus | limosoque palus obducat pascua iunco.
page 71 note 1 In Quest of Virgil's Birthplace, pp. 76 sq. Whatever else is true, no reader of the Eclogues can fail to feel that the farm was not too far from Virgil's beloved Mincio.
page 71 note 2 P. 67.
page 71 note 3 See pp. 46–65. Other views that I took last summer are reproduced in Nardi's, Breve Guida al Paese Natio di Virgilio, Mantua, 1930Google Scholar.
page 71 note 4 P. 45.
page 71 note 5 Conway (p. 70) rightly objects to my statement (p. 61) that ‘Bianor was the founder of Mantua and is mentioned by Virgil elsewhere’. The name occurs only here. In the other passage (Aen. X. 199) the name of the founder is given as Oenus, who in Servius's note is identified with Bianor. Since I supplied this information in n. 36, I hope no great harm was done by my careless statement.
page 71 note 6 Ecl. IX. 60: incipit apparere. That means, accordingto Conway (p. 70), that it ‘was to be seen from far’. How far? A mile away is far enough for the first sight of a monument.
page 71 note 7 P. 69.
page 72 note 1 P. 61.
page 73 note 1 P. 70.
page 73 note 2 P. 72.
page 73 note 3 Cf. Nardi's Breve Guida, to which I have referred, his Nuove Ricerche sul Paese Natale di Virgilio (Estratto, dal N. 2 di Virgiliana, Mantua, I. 2 [1930], 3–16Google Scholar), his review of In Quest of Virgil's Birthplace, ibid., I. I, 28–29, and his forthcoming La Tradizione Virgiliana di Pietole e suoi Fundamtnti—a review of Dal Zotto's Vicus Andicus—of which he kindly favoured me with an advance copy.
page 73 note 4 Classical Journal, XXVI. (1931), 533–540Google Scholar.