Mantua: Circle 8, Inferno 20   After Virgil identifies the prophetess Manto (daughter of Tiresias) in the pit of the sorcerers and astrologers, he goes to great pains to explain how his native city--Mantua--was in fact named after Manto for the simple reason that she had lived and died in the place before it was inhabited by other people (Inf. 20.52-93). The city was thus named, Virgil tells Dante, with no recourse to chance or magic (drawing lots, augury, divination, etc.). It may well be that Dante here allows Virgil, who himself enjoyed a widespread reputation in the Middle Ages for wizard-like powers, an opportunity to disassociate his city--and, by extension, himself--from the sort of activity punished in the fourth ditch. Virgil's association with magic could derive, for instance, from his eighth Eclogue, a poem in which a jealous female shepherd employs witchcraft to try to win back her lover: "Fetch water and around this altar wind soft wool / And burn the sappy vervain and male frankincense, / For by these magical rituals I hope to turn / My sweetheart's sanity; only spells are lacking now" (64-7). The woman then creates her own magical incantation by chanting the refrain, "Draw Daphnis back from town, my spells, draw Daphnis home." However, perjury may be the price for Virgil's attempt to exonerate himself from accusations of sorcery. Although Virgil insists that his version of the founding of Mantua in Inferno 20 is the only true version--any other account would be a falsehood (97-9)--a different version appears in, of all places, the Aeneid: in book 10 of his epic, Virgil explicitly attributes both the founding and the naming of Mantua to Manto's son Ocnus, a Tuscan warrior who comes to the aid of Aeneas in the Italian wars: "There, too, another chieftain comes who from / his native coasts has mustered squadrons: Ocnus, / the son of prophesying Manto and / the Tuscan river; Mantua, he gave you / walls and his mother's name--o Mantua . . ." (278-82). While this account by the author of the Aeneid does not contradict the claim by the Virgil of Dante's Inferno that Mantua was named "without recourse to sorcery," it is nonetheless an example of the "city's origin told otherwise."