Virgil and the Water of Nola in the Renaissance. The Debate on Georg. 2.224-5 between Pontano, Sannazaro, Ambrogio Leone, and Erasmus

In no Virgilian verse we find mentioned the Campanian city of Nola. Nonetheless, Aulus Gellius (NA 6.20) reports a curious anecdote in which the poet is said to have erased the name of Nola from a verse of his Georgics: where today we read vicina Vesevo / ora iugo (2.224-5), one would originally have found vicina Vesevo / Nola iugo. Revenge would have been the cause of such a damnatio memoriae: Virgil would have punished the Nolani, since they did not allow him to run their water into his estate, which was nearby. Gellius, who draws the story from a commentary whose name he does not reveal, does not seem to place much credit on it. On the contrary, the so-called Servius auctus, a commentary to the Virgilian work, quotes both the variant and the anecdote, and gives credence to it. The Nolan water affair reappears between the 15th and the 16th century, as a consequence of the development of classical studies and the circulation of new printed editions, included those of Gellius and of the Servian commentary to the Georgics. The prosperous city of Nola, fief of the Orsini, had to defend itself from the accusation of being hostile to the poets. In an age in which the cult of literature and valorization of the classical past constituted a relevant element of civic identity, such supposed hostility against Virgil and, therefore, against poetry, could damage a city like Nola, which aimed to excel among the universitates, i.e. the urban centers of the Kingdom of Naples. In his dialogue Actius, Giovanni Pontano wrote in favor of Nola, by using several arguments against the anti-Nolan anecdote. On the opposite, Jacopo Sannazaro composed a bitter epigram against the Nolan citizens, blaming them for having maltreated Virgil. The city put in circulation an anonymous epigram in which all Sannazaro’s charges were refuted. Nola’s honor was also defended by the Nolan doctor and philosopher Ambrogio Leone, who lived in his birthplace until he moved to Padua and Venice, where he became friend of such men of letters as Manutius, Musurus, Egnatius, and Erasmus of Rotterdam. In Venice, Leone wrote the De Nola (1514), a work in which he attempts to reconstruct Nola as it was in the Roman age, and in which he also describes Nola’s magnificence of his own times. In this book one can also find a detailed refutation of the anecdote about Virgil and the Nolan water. Erasmus himself participated in this debate, giving apparently credence to the anecdote: in writing a letter to his friend Leone, Erasmus congratulated him for having composed a work in praise of Nola, a city cui quondam Maro noster famam invidebat. This sentence could hardly have pleased the patriotic Nolan philosopher.