It is thus he pierced through a mountain near Naples and fashioned a bronze horse that had power to heal all the diseases of horses.

He was a necromancer, and there is still shown, in a certain town in Italy, the mirror in which he made the dead appear.

And yet a woman deceived this great sorcerer.

A Neapolitan courtesan invited him to hoist himself up to her window in the basket that was used to bring the provisions, and she left him all night suspended between two storeys." Brother Hilary did not appear to hear these observations.
"Virgil is a prophet," he replied, "and a prophet who leaves far behind him the sibyls with their sacred verses as well as the daughter of King Priam, and that great diviner of future things, Plato of Athens.

You will find in the fourth of his Syracusan cantos the birth of our Lord foretold in a lancune that seems of heaven rather than of earth.* In the time of my early studies, when I read for the first time JAM REDIT ET VIRGO, I felt myself bathed in an infinite delight, but I immediately experienced intense grief at the thought that, for ever deprived of the presence of God, the author of this prophetic verse, the noblest that has come from human lips, was pining among the heathen in eternal darkness.