VIRGIL AFTER 2000 YEARS

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 6

VIRGIL AFTER 2000 YEARS

The two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Virgil, the "divine poet," will be celebrated in 1930. Italy has begun already to make great plans for it. The United States will also have a nation-wide celebration that will be no whit behind that of Italy, because the American Classical League has announced a detailed programme through which it will foster the formation of various committees which, through it as a clearing house and general supervisor, will carry through a national Virgilian commemoration of the widest scope.

Virgil died at Brundisium, the modern Brindisi, where tourists then took ship from Italy to the east, exactly as they do now. But it was not in Brundisium that Virgil would be buried. Naples and its beautiful bay was the idol of his heart. There he had his favourite villa, there he had built a columbarium in which the ashes of his freedmen should repose. Everyone who has visited Naples has gone up on Posillipo to see the famous grotto and the tomb of Virgil. Two Roman consuls reverently carried the remains of the great poet along the via Puteolana to the temples opposite the hill whose scarped sides glistened in the afternoon sun. The architect, Lucius Cocceius, excavated a subterranean grotto back into the tufa of the hill. During the Roman imperial epoch it was known as the cripta neapolitana; in the Middle Ages it became an object of superstitious veneration. Just outside the grotto were built two chapels, an earlier one known as S. Maria dell 'Idria, and a later one called S. Maria di Piedigrotta. In the second half of the fifteenth century Alphonse of Aragon, who was then the King of Naples, had the grotto closed, and despite the efforts for years it was not until 1889 that Senator Enrico Cocchia was again able to establish its identity.

To be sure, it has been questioned for years whether or not Virgil was buried in or near this grotto, particularly on the ground that it was the regular custom of the Romans to entomb their illustrious dead in mausolea that lined both sides of the main interurban thoroughfares. If Virgil was buried in the usual way, then his tomb would be beneath the lapping water of the blue Neapolitan bay. The ancient road along the coast, due to volcanic disturbance and the encroaching bay, now lies some fathoms deep beneath the water that laves the feet of Posillipo. But there is as yet no positive proof to say whether tradition or archaeological probability will gain its point. The Italian Government has appointed Professor Minto to the task of overseeing the work, which has just begun, to clear out the grotto and to pursue researches that will elucidate the two-thousand-year-old mystery and validate if possible the ancient Italian tradition.

Already another exploration a few miles away at the entrance to the cave of the Sibyl r.t Cumae has discovered a vaulted corridor that leads back to a rectangular forecourt, which must be the vestibule to the oracular caVe itself. Italy has made a splendid beginning in preparation for the celebration of the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of its greatest poet, Master Virgil.