Again, I would suggest that it was at Naples that Vergil may most readily
have come upon the "messianic" ideas that occur in the fourth _Eclogue_,
for despite all the objections that have been raised against using that
word, conceptions are found there which were not yet naturalized in the
Occident. The child in question is thought of as a Soter whose _deeds_
the poet hopes to sing (l. 54), and furthermore lines 7 and 50 contain
unmistakably the Oriental idea of _naturam parturire_, as Suetonius
phrases it (_Aug_. 94). Quite apart from the likelihood that the Gadarene
may have gossiped at table about the messianic hopes of the Hebrews,
which of course he knew, it is not conceivable that he never betrayed any
knowledge of, or interest in, the prophetic ideas with which his native
country teemed. Meleager, also a Gadarene, preserved memories of the
people of his birthplace in his poems, and Caecilius of Caleacte, who
seems to have been in Italy at about this time, was not beyond quoting
Moses in his rhetorical works.[7]

[Footnote 7: It is generally assumed that his book was the source for the
quotation in _Pseudo-Longinus_.]

Furthermore, Naples was the natural resort of all those Greek and
Oriental rhetoricians and philosophers, historians, poets, actors, and
artists who drifted Romeward from the crumbling courts of Alexandria,
Antioch, and Pergamum. There they could find congenial surroundings while
discovering wealthy patrons in the numerous villas of the idle rich near
by, and thither they withdrew at vacation time if necessity called them
to Rome for more arduous tasks. Andronicus, the Syrian Epicurean, brought
to Rome by Sulla, made his home at nearby Cumae; Archias, Cicero's
client, also from Syria, spent much time at Naples, and the poet
Agathocles lived there; Parthenius of Nicaea, to whom the early Augustans
were deeply indebted, taught Vergil at Naples. Other Orientals like
Alexander, who wrote the history of Syria and the Jews, and Timagenes,
historian of the Diadochi, do not happen to be reported from Naples, but
we may safely assume that most of them spent whatever leisure time they
could there.

Puteoli too was still the seaport town of Rome as of all Central Italy,
and the Syrians were then the carriers of the Mediterranean trade.[8]
That is one reason why Apollo's oracles at Cumae and Hecate's necromatic
cave at Lake Avernus still prospered. When Vergil explored that region,
as the details of the sixt