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DISCOVIiUY 



New Light on Old Authors 



II. Vergil among the Prophets 

 By R. S. Conway, Litt.D., F.B.A. 



llulmc Pro/cssor o/ Latin in the Uniuersilu o/ Manchester 



It is one of the most interesting facts in the hterary, 

 and indeed in the rehgious, history of Europe that the 

 Roman poet Vergil, who died in 19 B.C., should have 

 been counted for some eighteen centuries an inspired 

 prophet of the Christian Messiah. Nor was the behef 

 merely a popular tradition cherished by those to whom 

 Vergil was only an ancient name, like the behef in his 

 magical powers which survives among the Italian 

 peasantry to this day. It was precisely the most noble 

 and learned students of Vergil's own writings who held 

 the belief most strongly. 



The Emperor Constantine recognised Christianity as 

 the religion of the Roman Empire in a.d. 313 ; and 

 according to his biographer, the Bishop Eusebius, one 

 of the ways in which he justified his action was by 

 appealing to Vergil, the most re\'ered of aU the poets 

 of pagan Rome. For, according to Constantine and 

 his religious advisers, Vergil had actually predicted the 

 birth and spiritual reign of Christ Himself, though the 

 poet did not name the DeUvercr of the world " for fear 

 of persecution," as Eusebius rather quaintly adds. 

 About a century later St. Augustine, the great Bishop 

 of Hippo in North Africa, who was a devoted admirer 

 and student of Vergil's Mneid, still maintained ' that 

 Vergil himself had embodied in one of his poems a real 

 and older prophecy of Christ ; though Augustine did 

 not suppose that Vergil himself fully understood who 

 it was whose coming he thus foretold. The belief re- 

 mained in Italy all through the Middle Ages. As we 

 all know, Vergil was chosen by the greatest of medieval 

 poets, Dante, as the spirit in the After-world who 

 might most fitly conduct him through the great ex- 

 ploration of Hell and Purgatory, which is the theme 

 of the first two-thirds of his Divine Comedy. Nor is 

 this merely the homage of one great poet to another 

 of kindred spirit. Dante expressly tells us many times 

 that Vergil had the power of converting men to a know- 

 ledge of Christian tnitli. And even though Vergil must 

 relinquish the duty of guiding him at the gates of 

 Paradise, Beatrice, the angel who is to conduct him in 

 this last part of his journey, declares boldly - that she 

 "will often speak the praise" of Vergil before her 

 Divine Master. More explicitly still, when Dante 

 meets' the poet Statius, whom he supposed to have 

 been a Christian, in Purgatory, Statius is represented 

 as declaring that he owed to Vergil's prophecy his first 

 interest and belief in Christianity. In our own country, 



• Ep. ad Rom. inchoata exposilio, i, c. 3. 

 • Inferno, ii. 73. ' Purgalorio, x.xii. Ol. 



no farther back than the year 1709, the p)oct Pope, 

 in his pastoral poem called " The Messiah," accepts the 

 view of St. Augustine that Vergil had taken over the 

 prediction of an unnamed Deliverer from an earlier 

 prophet called the Sibyl. 



Pope was a Roman Catholic and followed the tra- 

 dition of his Church ; but his Protestant critic, Samuel 

 Johnson, that pillar of English common-sense and sound 

 literary judgment, does not in the least demur.* 



On the other hand, modern commentators on Vergil 

 either pass by the whole matter in silence as a thing 

 beneath their notice, or roundly condemn it as a 

 "ridiculous" or "blasphemous" notion. So we have a 

 responsible scholar of the nineteenth century accusing 

 the poet Dante, and the critic Samuel Johnson, of 

 blasphemy ! In these painful circumstances it may 

 interest the readers of Discovery to examine the causes 

 which led the great thinkers and poets whom we have 

 named to interpret Vergil so confidently in this way. 



The question is really twofold. First, what was 

 there in Vergil to make his Christian admirers and 

 students think him worthy to be a prophet of the 

 Founder of their own faith ; and, secondly, what 

 was the nature of the actual poem in which they 

 thought he had made the prediction ? 



The first question is altogether too large to be 

 answered here.* Suffice it to say that no one has read 

 properly even a single Book of that poet if he has not 

 reahsed something of the profound and tender-hearted 

 personality which made so many great Christians eager 

 to reckon him as a forerunner of their Master. It is 

 the second question which concerns us here, and to 

 which the study of recent years has made it possible to 

 give at least a somewhat fuller answer than ever before. 

 In an earher paper, " The Secret of Philae," • some 

 reference was made to the earhest period of Vergil's 

 poetical work, in wliich he was closely associated with 

 Ills fellow-poet Gallus. Like all young poets, they 

 began by imitating their predecessors ; and the models 

 to whom it was the fashion to look in Vergil's early 

 days were the later Greek poets who flourished in the 

 third century B.C. at Alexandria, under the patronage 

 of the Graeco-Egyptian monarchs who had succeeded 

 to that part of the Empire of Alexander the Great. 

 In that city was Ihe greatest libraiy of the ancient 

 world ; and under despotic patrons, originality or 

 breadth of \'iew, or even any great depth of imaginative 



« Johnson, Lives of the Poets, edited by M. Arnold, p. 4I9- 

 '• Further details of the reasons which naturally inclined the 

 Christian Church in the early centuries to regard Vergil as 

 prophesying a Messiali, especially his sense of the guilt of 

 mankind, his confident hope of a Heaven-sent Deliverer, and 

 the kind of spirit which he expected the Deliverer to introduce, 

 have been described in the Essay on The Messianic Idea in 

 Vergil, to which reference is made at the end of this article. 

 " Discovery, vol. i, p. 4. 



