status,” the magistrates of the town and their descendants secured citizenship from the beginning, and finally in 89 B.C. the whole colony received full citizenship.  But quite apart from this, all of Cisalpine Gaul, as the region was called, was receiving immigrants from all parts of Italy throughout the second century, when the fields farther south were being exhausted by long tilling, and were falling into the hands of capitalistic landlords and grazers.  Since Roman citizenship was a personal rather than a territorial right, such immigrants could preserve their political status despite their change of habitation.  The probabilities are, therefore, that in any case Vergil, though born in the province, was of the old Latin stock.

[Footnote 5:  Vergil we know was tall and dark.  The Gauls were as a rule fair with light hair.  The Etruscans on the other hand, while dark, were generally short of stature.  Such data are however not of great importance.]

About the child appropriate stories gathered in time, but what the biographers chose to repeat in the credulous days of Donatus, when Rome was almost an Oriental city, need not detain us long.  To Donatus, no doubt, Magia seemed a suitable name for the mother of a poet who knew the mysteries of the lower world; that she dreamed prophetically of the coming greatness of her son, we may grant as a matter of course.  Sober judgment, however, can hardly accept the miraculous poplar tree which shot up at the place of nativity, or the birth-stories deriving “Vergilus” from virga, contrary to early Latin nomenclature and phonology.  It is well to mention these things merely so that we may keep in mind how little faith the late biographers really deserve.

Donatus is also inclined to accept the tradition that Vergil’s father was a potter and a man of very humble circumstances.  That Vergil’s father made pottery may be true; a father’s occupation was apt to be recorded in Augustan biography—­but it requires some knowledge of Roman society to comprehend what these words meant at the end of the Republic.  In Donatus’ day a “potter” was a day-laborer in loin-cloth and leather apron, earning about twenty cents for a long day of fourteen hours.  Needless to say, Vergil’s leisured competence during many years did not draw from such a trickling source.  Donatus had forgotten that in Vergil’s day the economic system of Rome was entirely different.  At the end of the Republic, the potters of Northern Italy conducted factories of enormous output, for they had with their artistic red-figured ware captured the markets of the whole Mediterranean basin.  The actual workmen were not Roman citizens by any means, but slaves.  And we should add that while industrial producers, like traders, were in general held in low esteem, because most of them were foreigners and freedmen, the producers of earthenware had by accident escaped from the general odium.  The reason was simply that earthenware production began as a