BANDUSIAE FONS
BANDUSIAE FONS a fountain in Apulia, a few miles from Venusia, celebrated by Horace in a beautiful and well-known ode. (
Carm. 3.13.)
The name not being elsewhere mentioned, it was supposed by many Writers, beginning with the old scholiast Acron (
ad loc.), that the fountain in question was in the neighbourhood of his Sabine farm.
But the Abbé Chaupy proved that a fountain about 6 miles S. of Venusia was known, as late as the beginning of the 12th century, by the name of Fons Bandusinus; and an ancient church is mentioned in ecclesiastical documents as “ecclesiam SS. MM. Gervasi et Protasi
in Bandusino Fonte apud Vesnusianm.” Both the church and the fountain have now disappeared, but the site of the former is well known, and immediately close to it was a copious source called
Fontana Grande, the waters of which are still abundant, though the fountain itself has been intentionally destroyed by the proprietor of the spot. (Chaupy,
Découverte de la Maison d'Horace, vol. iii. pp. 364, 538--543.)
The documentary evidence seems conclusive in favour of the Venusian fountain; but a source, or rather basin, not far from the site of his Sabine farm in the valley of
Licenza, now called
Fonte Bello, is still shown to travellers as the Fons Bandusiae, and its claim to that distinction is strenuously advocated by Dennis, in a letter inserted in Milman's
Life of Horace (p. 103).
The name is written, in the older editions of Horace, BLANDUSIA, but the best MSS. have BANDUSIA. (Obbarius, in his edition of the
Odes of Horace, Jena, 1848, has collected all the authorities upon the subject in a note on the ode in question.)
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E.H.B]
