The structure and syntax of decoration like that in the St. Petersburg Gregory manuscript’s illumination cannot be found in ancient decorated manuscripts, at least not among those that have survived. That is not to say that such features are necessarily foreign to the tradition of ancient books, discussed in the next chapter, for analogous features may be found in ancient texts. Latin rhetorical figures and composition offer significant analogies to the ornamental arrangements presented in the St. Petersburg Gregory manuscript, preeminently in the works of the Roman author best known and most influential during the medieval period, Vergil. For what seems to me a striking example of such an analogy, I would like to quote two lines from Vergil’s Aeneid Book VII, 759–760, about the hero Umbro, mentioned in the catalogue of Italian warriors, but destined for death.