A Pagan Poet Made into a Christian Prophet

The fourth Eclogue is a short poem written before the Aeneid, announcing that a great order of ages is being born again and that with the birth of a certain boy the iron race will end and a golden one arise across the whole world. In its own setting it is almost certainly about a hoped for child in the politics of the 40s BCE. From the fourth century onward Christians read it as a prophecy of Christ. Constantine argued the case at length in an address to an assembly of bishops, Lactantius used it, and the reading became standard enough that Virgil could be treated as a witness to a revelation he predated by a generation, which is a status no other pagan author achieved.

Two further afterlives follow from it. His text was used as an oracle, opened at random and read for guidance, a practice recorded from antiquity through the Middle Ages. And in medieval Naples a legend grew of Virgil as a magician who protected the city by enchantment, a reputation with no basis in anything he wrote. Dante drew the strands together by making him the guide who can lead the pilgrim through Hell and up Purgatory but not into Paradise, reason going as far as reason can and stopping precisely where it must.