Polentine Wools.
1. Not wools alone, that wear the face of woe;
Her goblets once did proud Polentia show.
2. Our sable hue to croplings may belong,
That tend the table, not of primal throng.
Elphinston’s Translation.
[339] Pliny, L. viii. Columella, vii. 2. To these testimonies may be added Silius Italicus de Bello Punico, l. viii. 597.
The country people about Modena and in other parts of the Northern Apennines still wear undyed woollen cloth of a gray color. Muratori quotes from the statutes of the city of Modena, A. D. 1327, a law to prevent the makers of such cloth from mixing with their gray wool the hair of oxen, asses, or other animals[340].
[340] Dissertazioni sopra le Antichità Italiane, Diss. 30. tomo ii. 48, 49, 4to edition. This author in his 21st Dissertation endeavors to assign reasons for the decline of the modern Italians in the growth and manufacture of wool.
Before quitting Italy we may properly inquire, whence and how came the practice of sheep-breeding into Great Britain. It has already been observed that the very improved state of the art at Tarentum may be in part ascribed to the intercourse of its inhabitants with the Milesians. The reader will have noticed the fact that the worship of Pan was introduced into Italy from Arcadia by Evander, from which circumstance it may be reasonably inferred, that improvements in the management of sheep were also introduced at the same time. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Evander with his companions was said by the Romans to have migrated to Latium about sixty years before the Trojan war[341]. The same historian alleges that this colony taught in Italy the use of letters, of instrumental music and other arts, established laws, and brought some degree of refinement instead of the former savage mode of life. The story of the birth of Romulus and Remus supposes sheep-breeding to have been practiced at the period of that event, and in a state of society similar to that which we have found prevailing further eastward; for it is stated, that Faustulus, who discovered them, kept the king’s flocks. He was “magister regii pecoris[342].”