Gripla - 01.01.1984, Side 266

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GRIPLA
It seems unlikely, however, that the list of ‘feriform’ cities presented
in the Imago Mundi could have originated with Honorius. Isidore, for
instance, refers to the derivation of the name Brundisium from a ‘Greek’
(i.e. Messapian) dialect-word, brunda, meaning ‘the head of a stag’, and
explains that the name of the city mirrors its shape:
Brundisium construxerunt Graeci: Brundisium autem dictum est
Graece quod brunda caput cervi dicatur: sic est enim ut et cornua
videantur et caput et lingua in positione ipsius civitatis.9
And the same information is provided by Strabo and Stephanus of
Byzantium among others.10 It is also interesting to compare the passages
from Honorius and Gervase with a longer catalogue of the animals
associated with various cities included in the early-fourteenth-century
Milanese chronicle of Galvanus de Flamma. Galvanus names ‘Varro the
poet’ as his authority, but I have not been able to find a source for
the list:
. . . Auratæ Virginis candidum Gallum bajulantis, speciosissimam
formam Mediolani, totius Italiæ, Normandiæ, et Saxoniæ ferentem
diadema, designat figura. Sic Roma leonis, Brundisium cervi, Troja
equi, Carthago bovis, Janua griffonis, Cremona porcæ, Papia vul-
pis, Placentia galli, ob significationem Varro Poeta testatur.* 11
Rome from 1252 to 1257 (the period during which the Italian version of the work
was composed), and suggests that it may have been to him that the book was dedi-
cated. Monaci also recalls the parallel passage in the Imago Mundi, and adds that
the same information about the shape of Rome is found in a letter written by Cola
di Rienzo (ed. K. Burdach and Paul Piur, Briefwechsel des Coia di Rienzo, in Bur-
dach, Vom Mittelalter zttr Reformation [1912-29], II.3, Nr. 57 [August, 1350],
275/1108-9): ‘... et ipsi muri Vrbis edificati sunt in formam cuiusdam leonis
iacentis’ (cf. ibid., 275, n. ad loc.; II.5, 378,474).
9 Etymoiogiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay (1911), XV. 1. 49.
10 See Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1900-), s.v. Brundisium, 2210/67ff.; A.
Pauly - G. Wissowa - W. Kroll, Real-Encyclopadie der klassischen Altertumswis-
senschaft (1893-), III.1, s.v. Brundisium, 902/51 ff.
11 Chronica Mediolani seu Manipulus Florum, ed. L. A. Muratori, Scriptores
Rerum Italicarum XI (1727), 539D, cap. ii, ‘De figuris, sub quibus aliquæ Civitates
figurantur’. The similarity of this list (which is also found ibid., 588D) to the pas-
sages from Honorius and Gervase is noted by Graf, op. cit., I, 10. On Galvanus see
T. Kaeppeli, O.P., Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, II (1975), 6ff.