In point of fact the pastoral scenery in Vergil is Neapolitan.  The eighth Catalepton is proof that Vergil was at Naples when he heard of the dangers to his father’s property in the North.  It is doubtful whether Vergil ever again saw Mantua after leaving it for Cremona in his early boyhood.  The property, of course, belonged not to him but to his father, who, as the brief poem indicates, had remained there with his family.  The pastoral scenery seldom, except in the ninth Eclogue, pretends to be Mantuan.  Even where, as in the first, the poem is intended to convey a personal expression of gratitude for Vergil’s exemption from harsh evictions, the poet is very careful not to obtrude a picture of himself or his own circumstances.  Tityrus is an old man, and a slave in a typical shepherd’s country, such as could be seen every day in the mountains near Naples.  And there were as many evictions near Naples as in the North.  Indeed it is the Neapolitan country—­as picturesque as any in Italy—­that constantly comes to the reader’s mind.  We are told by Seneca that thousands of sheep fed upon the rough mountains behind Stabiae, and the clothier’s hall and numerous fulleries of Pompeii remind us that wool-growing was an important industry of that region.  Vergil’s excursion to Sorrento was doubtless not the only visit across the bay.  Behind Naples along the ridge of Posilipo,[2] below which Vergil was later buried, in the mountains about Camaldoli, and behind Puteoli all the way to Avernus—­a country which the poet had roamed with observant eyes—­there could have been nothing but shepherd country.  Here, then, are the crags and waterfalls and grottoes that Vergil describes in the Eclogues.

[Footnote 2:  The picturesque road from Naples to Puteoli clung to the edge of the rocky promontory of Posilipo, finally piercing the outermost rock by means of a tunnel now misnamed the “grotto di Sejano.”  Most of the road is now under twenty feet of water:  See Guenther, Pausilypon.  To see the splendid ridge as Vergil saw it from the road one must now row the length of it from Naples to Nesida, sketching in an abundance of ilexes and goats in place of the villas that now cover it.]

And here, too, were doubtless as many melodious shepherds as ever Theocritus found in Sicily, for they were of the same race of people as the Sicilians.  Why should the slopes of Lactarius be less musical than those of Aetna?  Indeed the reasonable reader will find that, except for an occasional transference of actual persons into Arcadian setting—­by an allegorical turn invented before Vergil—­there is no serious confusion in the scenery or inconsistent treatment in the plots of Vergil’s Eclogues.  But by failing to make this simple assumption—­naturally due any and every poet—­readers of Vergil have needlessly marred the effect of some of his finest passages.