Inferno XX deals with validity and legitimacy of acts of writing and reading. As Hollander has shown, Dante evokes his classical auctores in order to correct them, misreading their texts in such a way as to damn diviners, like Amphiaraus and Tiresias, whom ancients considered noble practitioners of art, tellers of truth. By placing these diviners in fourth bolgia, Dante establishes their falsity, and his disagreement on this score with his classical predecessors. One of classical predecessors so invoked is Vergil, Comedy's resident poeta, and it is as his new self that Vergil retells story of Manto, altering earlier account found in tenth book of Aeneid. The Latin poem relates that prophetess bears a child, Ocnus, who founds city and gives it his mother's name: «qui muros matrisque dedit tibi, Mantua, nomen» («who gave you walls and name of his mother, O Mantua» [Aen. X, 200]). The Comedy, on other hand, relates that Manto, «la vergine cruda» (82), settled and died in a spot later chosen by men from surrounding regions as suitable for a city: «Fer la città sovra quell' ossa morte» (91). Most interesting about Vergil's speech is his closing injunction to pilgrim to disregard all other accounts of Mantova's founding; since only true story is one he has just heard, pilgrim must «let no lie defraud truth», i.e. he must reject all other accounts as false (97-99):” (1)

Irvin