But there are ancient inscriptions galore, worked into the masonry of buildings or lying about at random. Mommsen has collected numbers of them in his _Corpus,_ and since that time some sixty new ones have been discovered. And then—the stone lions of Roman days, couched forlornly at street corners, in courtyards and at fountains, in every stage of decrepitude, with broken jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa is a veritable infirmary for mutilated antiques of this species. Now the lion is doubtless a nobly decorative beast, but—_toujours perdrix!_ Why not a few griffons or other ornaments? The Romans were not an imaginative race.
The country around must have looked different in olden days. Horace describes it as covered with forests, and from a manuscript of the early seventeenth century which has lately been printed one learns that the surrounding regions were full of “hares, rabbits, foxes, roe deer, wild boars, martens, porcupines, hedgehogs, tortoises and wolves”—wood-loving creatures which have now, for the most part, deserted Venosa. Still, there are left some stretches of oak at the back of the town, and the main lines of the land cannot change. Yonder lies the Horatian Forense and “Acherontia’s nest”; further on, the glades of Bantia (the modern Banzi); the long-drawn Garganian Mount, on which the poet’s eye must often have rested, emerges above the plain of Apulia like an island (and such it is: an island of Austrian stone, stranded upon the beach of Italy). Monte Vulture still dominates the landscape, although at this nearness the crater loses its shapely conical outline and assumes a serrated edge. On its summit I perceive a gigantic cross—one of a number of such symbols which were erected by the clericals at the time of the recent rationalist congress in Rome.
From this chronicler I learn another interesting fact: that Venosa was not malarious in the author’s day. He calls it healthy, and says that the only complaint from which the inhabitants suffered was “ponture” (pleurisy). It is now within the infected zone. I dare say the deforestation of the country, which prevented the downflow of the rivers—choking up their beds with detritus and producing stagnant pools favourable to the breeding of the mosquito—has helped to spread the plague in many parts of Italy. In Horace’s days Venosa was immune, although Rome and certain rural districts were already malarious. Ancient votive tablets to the fever-goddess Mephitis (malaria) have been found not far from here, in the plain below the present city of Potenza.