The Grave of Vergil

That Vergil died in Brindisi and that his remains were carried, by his wish, for burial to Naples was common knowledge in Dante's time and has remained so through the centuries, down to Hermann Broch in our own day. The ultimate extant source of this information is the brief biography written according to modern scholarship by Suetonius about I IO A.D., a century and a quarter after Vergil's death in 19 B.C.2 For Dante, and indeed until the present century, this most widely diffused and influential of ancient Vergilian vitae enjoyed the authority of the great fourth-century grammarian to