VIRGIL THE NECROMANCER: STUDIES IN VIRGILIAN LEGENDS, by John Webster Spargo. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1934. $5.00.
LIKE Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, and the other great pagans who enjoyed, for whatever reason, a mediaeval reputation, Virgil was vulgared into a necromancer. Although to the learned few he was "poeta doctus," and was through the Fourth Eclogue the cherished prophet of the churchmen, the common legends centered about magic of a more obvious kind, and in them Virgil made glass talismans to confound the flies of Naples.
It would have been very easy for Professor Spargo to lapse into sociology and to give ingenious reasons, neatly a priori, for some of these legends. The scholars of the Renaissance, which was so baldly contemptuous of the mediaeval tradition, loved to interpret this legend weaving as mere monkery; more detachted observers are willing to admit that it is, above all, a tribute to the rich common life of the middle age. That cage, as Domenico Comparetti has carefully shown, understood and venerated the literary art of Virgil, and its educated men read and preserved the Virgilian manuscripts with a diligence not inferior to our own. The common man today does not believe that Virgil was a thaumaturge; but this testifies not so much to a popular rejection of thaumaturgy as to a popular ignorance of Virgil.
A few of the legends are found, of course in the great mediaeval encyclopaedias such as that of Vincent, and, like other things in Vincent's encyclopaedia, they are uncritically related. But this, only indicates a fact which none denies, that the middle age had not developed a critical technique for the writing of history, and only a dull reading back of our own critical standards can prove that Vincent, and his learned contemporaries, were themselves credulous of these legends. If they did not distinguish fact from fancy in the modern scholarly manner, the fair inference is that this proves, not a moony confusion of fact with fancy, but the lack of a systematic scholarly apparatus for the distinction.
Professor Spargo's task is the classification and tracing of the legends; he does not inquire into their psychological motivation, not does he attempt a history of the mediaeval literary criticism of Virgil. That task he has performed with examplary industry; each legend is tracked down to its written origin, and for the commoner of them he has provided a wealth of chronological tables and documentation. The most tenacious of the legends represented Virgil as an humiliated lover, suspended in a basket from his mistress' window. This appeared, in varying forms, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, everywhere with a local colour of its own. Scarcely less widespread was the story that Virgil had devised an ingenious lie detector, the bocca della verita, in the form of an animal's head which bit off the finger of anyone guilty of falsehood.
Through all of them runs the western impress of practicality; the bocca della verita was an eminently useful contrivance, and Virgil's talismanic glass fly was used, not to confound the people, but to rid their meat markets of flies and their cities of infection. A magician Virgil was, but a magician with a purpose, a great seer who bent his black art to the relief of human misery and the improvement of human society, and who had his place in the cosmic optimism of the middle age.
Professor Spargo, although he has performed a work primarily interesting to the scholar, fortified with the necessary scholarly thoroughness, has written a book which the layman can read and enjoy. The legends themselves fascinating, are recorded in a pleasant and charming way, together with a rich mine of attractive illustration from the topical art of the period.
