the epithets Geometer and Solivagus[1] which were applied to him, the former by the Annals of the Four Masters when recording his death, the other by an authority as yet untraced. Pope Zacharias, answering a complaint of Boniface, says, "with regard to the perverse and wicked doctrine which he has spoken, against God and his own soul; if it be made clear that he admits it, – that there is another world and other men, or sun and moon, beneath the earth (sub terra) – you must hold a council, deprive him of priestly rank, and expel him from the Church." This brief and rough characterisation has been made to bear the interpretation that Virgilius had published a philosophical treatise setting forth the view that there are Antipodes, possibly in dependence upon Martianus Capella's teaching. Or, it is put more modestly that he had given expression to this view in his lectures. It will be seen that the words of Zacharias contain nothing to support (and nothing to bar) this explanation. Another has been advanced which has never become fashionable, but which, I think, deserves to be weighed. It is that Virgilius had in his mind not Antipodes, but dwellers below the surface of the earth. In the twelfth century, as William of Newburgh tells us, a green boy and girl appeared at Woolpit in Suffolk, who were members of an underground race. They called their world the land of St Martin (perhaps Merlin was the real name) and told how it was lighted – not, it is true, by another sun and moon, – and how it was a Christian land and had churches. Any one who has read much of Scandinavian or Celtic fairy-lore will realise that the beliefs he finds there about the underground people are just such as could be described by Pope Zacharias's phrase. Were it not for the epithet Geometer, which does seem to imply an interest in science, I should be strongly inclined to give the preference to this second explanation of Virgilius's erroneous doctrine.
- ↑ It seems to have been assumed that the word is connected with Sol: but does it in fact mean more than "the lone wanderer"?
