• The tomb of Virgil is on the promontory of Pausilippo, overlooking the Bay of Naples. The inscription upon it is:⁠— Mantua me genuit: Calabri rapuere: tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces. “The epitaph,” says Eustace, Classical Tour , I 499, “which, though not genuine, is yet ancient, was inscribed by order of the Duke of Pescolangiano, then proprietor of the place, on a marble slab placed in the side of the rock opposite the entrance of the tomb, where it still remains.” Forsyth, Italy , p. 378, says:⁠— “ Virgil’s tomb is so called, I believe, on the single authority of Donatus. Donatus places it at the right distance from Naples, but on the wrong side of the city; and even there he omits the grotto of Posilipo, which not being so deep in his time as the two last excavations have left it, must have opened precisely at his tomb. Donatus, too, gives, for Virgil’s own composition, an epitaph on the cliff now rejected as a forgery. And who is this Donatus?⁠—an obscure grammarian, or rather his counterfeit. The structure itself resembles a ruined pigeon-house, where the numerous columbaria would indicate a family-sepulchre: but who should repose in the tomb of Virgil, but Virgil alone? Visitors of every nation, kings and princes, have scratched their names on the stucco of this apocryphal ruin, but the poet’s awful name seems to have deterred them from versifying here.” ↩