TOMB OF VIRGIL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19147, 15 April 1924, Page 12

TOMB OF VIRGIL.

By ihe Italian Government’s purchase of the tomb of 1 irgil the preservation of a shrine more than once desecrated is assured (states a correspondent of the. Manchester Guardian), sceptics have doubted whether the ashes of the poet, were ever really deposited in this small vaulted chamber in u. private garden at Pozzuloli, near the black and once horror-haunted grotto of Posilipo; and in any case the funeral urn. (he supposed repository of the ashes, which stood in the centre of (lie chamber supported by its marble pillars, disappeared several centuries ago. Pe.it it is admitted that within a hundred years of Virgil’s death at Binndusium, the chamber of Pozzulcrli bad become a place of literary pilgrimage. Even if the burial of Virgil in the Pozzuloli tomb were the vaguest of legends instead of a credibly established fact, the tomb would lie worth preservation by reason of its later memories. A gigantic bay tree which once shadowed it is said to have died on the death of Dante. Petrarch planted a tree to take, its place, and this perished unrornantically and piecemeal at the hands of eighteenth century curio hunters. Perhaps the most dramatic incident connected with the tomb was Boccaccio s solemn renunciation there of the career of a merchant, for which his father had intended him, for that of a poet. A much older and more shadowy story says that St. Paul, when he was making his famous journey to Borne, disembarked at Puteoli. was conducted to Virgil’s tomb and wept because he, had missed the opportunity of converting to Christianity a soul so attuned by nature to (he now faith. The quaint old Latin line,s which embody the tradition have been translated thus by the present President of Magdalen : To Maro’s mound the way they led, The Apostle raining o’er the dead

The true and tender tear; “Alive,” he cried, “hadst thou been found, How high a saint I here bad crowned. Thou poet without peer!”