Around 40 BCE Virgil published a pastoral poem, the Fourth Eclogue, addressed to the consul Asinius Pollio, promising the imminent birth of a child whose growth to manhood would see a golden age return, framed against the Sibylline doctrine of a cycle of returning ages. Three and a half centuries later, Christian writers read the poem as an unwitting prophecy of the birth of Christ, a reading that entered mainstream Christian tradition and outlived every rival explanation of the poem for well over a thousand years.
Facts
Disputed
Claimed FulfillmentThat Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, though written by a pagan poet three and a half centuries before Christ's birth, unknowingly foretold it. This record states the claim as the Christian tradition that read it this way stated it, without asserting that Virgil intended or achieved genuine foreknowledge of anything. 2 Documented ResponseModern classical scholarship rejects the messianic reading. R.G.M. Nisbet's 1978 study reads the poem's apparently Judeo-Christian imagery as explicable through Virgil's own access to eastern Mediterranean oracular material circulating in Rome, situating the poem in its own stated occasion, most plausibly the consulship of Pollio and the Peace of Brundisium, rather than as prophecy of any kind. The reading is not treated as bad faith on the part of Lactantius, Constantine or Dante, only as a claim about the poem's meaning that the text's own context does not support. 3 Dating
Predicted DateNo calendar date named in the poem itself, only that the promised child's birth is imminent at the time of writing, around 40 BCE. The reading that the poem foretold Christ was applied roughly three and a half centuries after it was written, from the early fourth century CE onward. 1 Date AttributedThe poem itself, around 40 BCE. The messianic reading of it is first securely attested in the early fourth century CE, in Lactantius's Divinae Institutiones. 2 Origins
Attributed Author / CompilerVirgil, who wrote and published the poem under his own name; the prophetic reading of it was not his own claim but was applied to his text long after his death. 1 Sources
Primary SourceVirgil, Eclogue IV; Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, for the earliest developed Christian reading of it. 1 Fulfillment
Documented ResponseLactantius's Divinae Institutiones, written in the early fourth century CE, is the earliest surviving developed argument that the poem prophesied Christ. Constantine himself later presented a similar line-by-line Christian reading of the Eclogue in public. Dante, writing more than a thousand years after Virgil, built an entire episode of the Purgatorio on the claim, having the poet Statius credit his own conversion to Christianity to reading Eclogue 4 rightly, and names Virgil the singer of the pastoral songs in the same passage. 2 Attributions
TraditionRoman Augustan-era pastoral poetry, drawing explicitly on the Sibylline oracular doctrine of successive world-ages that Roman religion already held; the later Christian reading is a distinct reception tradition applied to the same text. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The reception tradition that read and preserved the messianic interpretation of the poem, from Lactantius through Constantine to Dante, distinct from the poem's own Roman origin.
Attributed To
Belongs to Tradition
The poem itself invokes the Sibylline/Cumaean doctrine of successive ages that belongs to Roman Religion; the origin tradition, distinct from the later Christian reading.
Sources
1. Virgil, Eclogue IV (the Fourth Eclogue)
Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Harvard University Press, 1999
2. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones (Divine Institutes)
Lactantius, Liverpool University Press, 310
3. Nisbet, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue: Easterners and Westerners" (1978)
R. G. M. Nisbet, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 59-78, 1978
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.