reads:  “When ordered to leave unoccupied a district of three miles outside the city, you included within the district eight hundred paces of water which lies about the walls.”  The passage, of course, shows that Alfenus was a commissioner on the colonial board, as Servius says.  It does not excuse Servius’ error of making Alfenus Pollio’s successor as provincial governor[7] after Cisalpine Gaul had become autonomous, nor does it imply that Alfenus had in any manner been generous to Vergil or to any one else.  In fact it reveals Alfenus in the act of seizing an unreasonable amount of land.  Vergil,[8] of course, recognizes Alfenus’ position as commissioner in his ninth Eclogue where he promises him great glory if he will show mercy to Mantua: 

Vare, tuum nomen, superet modo Mantua nobis ...

And Vergil’s appeal to him was reasonable, since he, too, was a man of literary ambitions.[9] But there is no proof that Alfenus gave ear to his plea; at any rate the poet never mentions him again.  Servius’ supposition that Alfenus had been of service to the poet[10] seems to rest wholly on the mistaken idea that the sixth Eclogue was obsequiously addressed to him.  As we have seen, however, Quintilius Varus has a better claim to that poem.

[Footnote 6:  Servius Dan. on Ecl.  IX. 10; ex oratione Cornelii in Alfenum.  Cf.  Kroll, in Rhein.  Museum 1909, 52.]

[Footnote 7:  Servius Dan. on Ecl.  VI. 6.]

[Footnote 8:  Vergil, Eclogue IX, 26-29.]

[Footnote 9:  See Suffenus and Alfenus, Classical Quarterly, 1920, p. 160.]

[Footnote 10:  On Eclogue.  VI. 6.]

The quotation from the speech of Gallus also lends support to a statement in Servius that Gallus had been assigned to the duty of exacting moneys from cities which escaped confiscation.[11] For this we are duly grateful.  It indicates how Alfenus and Gallus came into conflict since the latter’s financial sphere would naturally be invaded if the former seized exempted territory for the extension of his new colony of Cremona.  In such conditions we can realize that Gallus was, as a matter of course, interested in saving Mantua from confiscation, and that in this effort he may well have appealed to Octavian in Vergil’s behalf.  In fact his interpretation of the three-mile exemption might actually have saved Vergil’s properties, which seem to have lain about that distance from the city.[12]

[Footnote 11:  Servius Dan. on Ecl.  VI. 64.]

[Footnote 12:  Vita Probiana, milia passuum XXX is usually changed to III on the basis of Donatus:  a Mantua non procul.]

Again, however, there is little reason for the supposition that Vergil’s Eclogues in honor of Gallus have any reference whatever to this affair.  The sixth followed the death of Siro, and the tenth seems to precede the days of colonial disturbances, if it has reference to Gallus as a soldier in Greece.  If the sixth Eclogue refers to Siro, as Servius holds, then Vergil and Gallus had long been literary associates before the first and ninth were written.