DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.786#0034
18 CERVETRI. [chap, xxxiii.
the homely name of La Vaccina, or the Cow-stream. Insig-
nificant as this turbid brook may appear, let him pause a
moment on the bridge and bethink him that it has had the
honour of being sung by Virgil. It is the Cceritis amnis
of the jEneid,1 on whose banks Tarcho and his Etruscans
pitched their camps, and iEneas received from his divine
mother his god-wrought arms and the prophetic shield
eloquent of the future glories of Rome,
------clypei non enarrabile textum.
Illic res Italas, Romanorumque triumphos,
Fecerat Ignipotens.
The eye wanders up the shrub-fringed stream, over bare
undulating downs, the area lata of ancient song, to the hills
swelling into peaks and girt with a broad belt of olive and
ilex. There frowned the dark grove of Silvanus, of dread
antiquity, and there, on yon red cliffs—the "ancient
heights " of Virgil—sat the once opulent and powerful city
of Agylla, the Caere of the Etruscans, now represented, in
name and site alone, by the miserable village of Cervetri.
All this is hallowed ground—religione patrum latd sacer—
hallowed, not by the traditions of evanescent creeds, nor
even by the hoary antiquity of the site, so much as by the
homage the heart ever pays to the undying creations of the
fathers of song. The hillocks which rise here and there on
the wide downs, are so many sepulchres of princes and
heroes of old, coeval, it may be, with those on the plains of
Troy; and if not, like them, the standing records of tradi-
tional events, at least the mysterious memorials of a prior
age, which led the poet to select this spot as a fit scene for his
verse. The large mound which rises close to the bridge
may be the celsus collis whence iEneas gazed on the Etrus-
can camp.2 No warlike sights or sounds now disturb the
1 Ma. VIII. 597. Pliny (N. H. III. 8) calls it, •' C^retanus amnis."
5 Ma. VIII., 604.
the homely name of La Vaccina, or the Cow-stream. Insig-
nificant as this turbid brook may appear, let him pause a
moment on the bridge and bethink him that it has had the
honour of being sung by Virgil. It is the Cceritis amnis
of the jEneid,1 on whose banks Tarcho and his Etruscans
pitched their camps, and iEneas received from his divine
mother his god-wrought arms and the prophetic shield
eloquent of the future glories of Rome,
------clypei non enarrabile textum.
Illic res Italas, Romanorumque triumphos,
Fecerat Ignipotens.
The eye wanders up the shrub-fringed stream, over bare
undulating downs, the area lata of ancient song, to the hills
swelling into peaks and girt with a broad belt of olive and
ilex. There frowned the dark grove of Silvanus, of dread
antiquity, and there, on yon red cliffs—the "ancient
heights " of Virgil—sat the once opulent and powerful city
of Agylla, the Caere of the Etruscans, now represented, in
name and site alone, by the miserable village of Cervetri.
All this is hallowed ground—religione patrum latd sacer—
hallowed, not by the traditions of evanescent creeds, nor
even by the hoary antiquity of the site, so much as by the
homage the heart ever pays to the undying creations of the
fathers of song. The hillocks which rise here and there on
the wide downs, are so many sepulchres of princes and
heroes of old, coeval, it may be, with those on the plains of
Troy; and if not, like them, the standing records of tradi-
tional events, at least the mysterious memorials of a prior
age, which led the poet to select this spot as a fit scene for his
verse. The large mound which rises close to the bridge
may be the celsus collis whence iEneas gazed on the Etrus-
can camp.2 No warlike sights or sounds now disturb the
1 Ma. VIII. 597. Pliny (N. H. III. 8) calls it, •' C^retanus amnis."
5 Ma. VIII., 604.