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The whole poem, therefore, is a delightful commentary upon Vergil's life in Siro's garden, written probably after Siro had died, the school closed, and Varus gone off to war. The younger man's school days are now over; he had found his idiom in a poetic form to which Messalla's experiments had drawn him. The Eclogues are already appearing in rapid succession.

Siro, who enjoyed great renown among us, taught me the system of Epicurus and thus freed me from vain terrors and turned me aside from the cruelties to which religion persuades ignorant men. I have embraced the views of Pythagoras concerning the souls of men and animals, both of which are of divine essence; this invites us to look upon ourselves without pride and without shame.

While its neighbours, Ventimiglia and Albenga, sank into haunts of a feudal noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy merchants, linked by treaties of commerce with the trading cities of the French and Italian coasts. The erection of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citizens.

Siro's villa apparently proved attractive to Vergil, for he made Naples his permanent home, despite the gift of a house on the Esquiline from Maecenas. This, however, is not Vergil's last mention of Siro, if we may believe Servius, who thinks that "Silenum" in the sixth Eclogue stands for "Sironem," its metrical equivalent.

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.

and Servius say Neapoli studuit, and the Ciris mention Cecropus horrulus, and Cicero in all his references place Siro on the bay of Naples, but a fragment of a Herculanean roll of Philodemus locates the garden school in the suburbs of Naples. II. 119, Cumaean villa; Acad. II. 106, Bauli; Ad. Fam. VI. 11.2; Vestorius is a Neapolitan; of. Class. Phil. 1920, p. 107, and Am. Jour. Philology, XLI, 115.

This happy idea may well have been suggested by table talks with Philodemus or Siro, who must at times have recalled stories of savior-princes that they had heard in their youth in the East.

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. The student of Vergil who has once compared the statements of the scholiasts with the historical facts at these few points, where they run parallel, will have little patience with the petty gossip which was elicited from the Eclogues.

Thus the two may have met in Epidius' lecture room in the year 50 B.C. Vergil could doubtless have afforded tuition under such a master since he presently engaged the no less distinguished Siro. We have the independent testimony of Suetonius that Epidius was Octavius' and Mark Antony's teacher.

As you leave Via Garibaldi and pass down Via Cairoli, on your left you pass Via S. Siro. Turning down this little way, you come almost immediately to the Church of S. Siro. The present building dates from the seventeenth century, but the old church, then called Dei Dodici Apostoli, was the Cathedral of Genoa.