The case for a Celtic origin is equally improbable.  From the time when the Senones burned Rome in 390 B.C. till Caesar conquered Gaul, the fear of invasions from this dread race never slumbered.  During the weary years of the Punic war when Hannibal drew his fresh recruits from the Po Valley, the determination grew ever stronger that the Alps should become Rome’s barrier line on the North.  Accordingly the pacification of the Transpadane region continued with little intermission until Polybius[3] could say two generations before Vergil’s birth that the Gauls had practically been driven out of the Po Valley, and that they then held but a few villages in the foothills of the Alps.  If this be true, the open country of Mantua must have had but few survivors.  And the few that remained were not often likely to have the privilege of intermarrying with the Roman settlers who filled the vacuum.  Romans were too proud of their citizenship to intermarry with peregrini and raise children who must by Roman laws forego the dignities of citizenship.[4]

[Footnote 3:  Polybius, II. 35, 4 (written about 140 B.C.).]

[Footnote 4:  Ulpian, Dig.  V. 8, ex peregrino et cive Romano, peregrinus nascitur.]

A Celtic strain of romance has been from time to time claimed for Vergil’s poetry, though those who employ such terms seldom agree in their definition of them.  His romanticism may be more easily explained by his early devotion to the Catullan group of poets, and the Celtic traits—­whatever they may be—­by the close racial affiliations between Celts and Italians, vouched for by anthropologists.  But the difficulty of applying the test of the “Celtic temperament” lies in the fact that there are apparently now no true representatives of the Celtic race from whom to establish a criterion.  The peoples that have longest preserved dialects of the Celtic languages appear from anthropometric researches to contain a dominant strain of a different race, perhaps that of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Western Europe.  It may be, therefore, that what Arnoldians now refer to the “Celts” is after all not Celtic.  At best it is unsafe to search for racial traits in the work of genius; in this instance it would but betray loose thinking.

The assumption of Celtic origin is, therefore, hazardous.[5] There is, however, a strong likelihood that Vergil’s forbears were among the Roman and Latin colonists who went north in search of new homes during the second century B.C.  Vergil’s father was certainly a Roman citizen, for none but a citizen could have sent his son to Rome to prepare for a political career.  Mantua indeed, a “Latin” town after 89 B.C., did not become a Roman municipality until after Vergil had left it, but Vergil’s father, according to the eighth Catalepton, had earlier in his life lived in Cremona.  That city was colonized by Roman citizens in 218 B.C. and recolonized in 190, and though the colonists were reduced to the “Latin