Justified True Belief

(●) Rome’s national poet, and the one pagan whose lines Christians read for a thousand years as if he had half-heard the gospel. + Publius Vergilius Maro wrote three books and then died before he could finish the third. That is the whole career. It was enough to make him the poet of an empire, the schoolbook of the Latin West, and the one pagan poet whom serious Christians spent centuries arguing about in the way you argue about a prophet. The argument started with sixty-three lines. In about 40 BC, in a short poem about shepherds and their fields, addressed to a Roman consul, he announced that a child was about to be born who would end the age of iron and start the world over. He almost certainly meant a Roman baby, in a year when everyone was exhausted by civil war and desperate for good news. Three and a half centuries later a Roman emperor stood up in front of a Christian assembly and explained, line by line, that the poet had been talking about Christ and had disguised it to stay out of trouble. Lactantius used the poem. Augustine took it seriously enough to answer it carefully. Dante put Virgil at the front of his poem as his guide and then had another soul say that those same lines had made him a Christian. One fact is worth holding on to: he did not want the third book to exist. Before sailing for Greece he made his friend Varius promise to burn the Aeneid if anything happened to him, and on his deathbed he called for the book-boxes so he could do it himself. Nobody brought them. Augustus overruled the will, the editors were told to cut but never to add, and the half-finished lines were left standing in the text where a reader can still see them.

(●) 70 BC: Born on a smallholding near Mantua, in a province that was not yet legally Italy. + The ancient Life is precise about the day. He was born "in the first consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus, on the Ides of October," which is the fifteenth of October, 70 BC, in "a district called Andes, not far distant from Mantua." Romans dated their years by the consuls, the two magistrates elected every year to run the state and command its armies, so that naming a year meant naming a pair of men, much as we might say "the year of the coronation." This particular pair is famous enough that the date is about as firm as an ancient birth date gets. His father was a self-made man of the smallest sort. Some said he was a potter; the general report was that he started as "the hired man of a certain Magus," married the boss’s daughter, and "greatly increased his little property by buying up woodlands and raising bees." Bees turn up again forty years later, in the last and strangest book of the Georgics, treated with the attention of somebody who had watched them since he was small. Mantua sat in Cisalpine Gaul, the flat country south of the Alps, which Rome governed as a province and did not admit to full citizenship until 49 BC, when Virgil was twenty. He grew up, in other words, as a provincial farm boy, and he looked it all his life: the Life describes him as "tall and of full habit, with a dark complexion and a rustic appearance," in poor health, shy of crowds, and so retiring that in Naples people called him Parthenias, "The Maiden." When he was recognised in the street at Rome he would duck into the nearest house.

(●) c. 55 BC: Schooled at Cremona, Milan and Rome, he pleaded one case in court and never pleaded another. + He took the plain white gown of manhood, the toga virilis, "upon his fifteenth birthday, in the consulship of the same two men who had been consuls the year he was born," which puts the ceremony in 55 BC. The Life adds that "it chanced that the poet Lucretius died that very same day." It is a beautiful coincidence, one great Latin poet handing off to the next, and it is exactly the sort of thing ancient biographers liked too much to be trusted on. Take it as a story the Romans told. A boy with that education was pointed toward the courts, where a Roman made his name. Virgil tried it once. "He pleaded one single case in court too, but no more," says the Life, "for he spoke very slowly and almost like an uneducated man." Imagine the scene from the back of the room: the tall shy provincial, feeling for his words in front of a crowd that had come for a performance. So he went to Naples instead, to study philosophy in Greek. A tradition going back to the ancient commentators, and to two short poems handed down under his name, puts him in the circle of Siro, an Epicurean teacher there. Epicureanism held that the world is atoms and void, that the gods exist but take no interest in us, and that the goal of life is a quiet mind. Whether or not he ever believed it, the poetry he went on to write is full of people asking what governs the world, and never once answers "nothing."

(●) c. 42 BC: War took the farms around Mantua, and out of that ruin came the ten Eclogues. + At Philippi in northern Greece in 42 BC, Mark Antony and the young Octavian beat the armies of Brutus and Cassius, the men who had killed Julius Caesar two years before. Then they had to pay for the victory. Between them the winners had tens of thousands of veterans owed a discharge and nothing in the treasury to give them, so they paid the soldiers in other men’s land. Whole districts of northern Italy were surveyed, confiscated and handed over. Families who had farmed a place for generations were told to walk off it. The Eclogues, ten short poems finished in about three years, are the first great Latin poems to put that in writing. An eclogue is simply a selection, a piece chosen out, and these ten are pastoral poems, which is to say poems set among herdsmen and their goats and their singing matches, in a countryside where nothing much is supposed to happen. Something happens anyway. The book opens with two shepherds meeting on a road. One of them is lounging under a beech tree with his farm safe under him, because a young god at Rome has looked kindly on him, and the young god is Octavian, the man who would take the name Augustus. The other is driving his goats away from land he will never see again. The ninth poem comes back to that same road and that same catastrophe. The ancient Life says the poems were written partly because powerful friends "had saved him from ruin," and that a veteran once nearly killed Virgil in a quarrel over his farm. Modern scholars point out, fairly, that most of the biography here has been reconstructed out of the poems themselves, which are not a diary. What is not in doubt is the subject: the poems know what it is to lose a farm. The fourth poem in the book, written in the consulship of Asinius Pollio in 40 BC, is the one that changed everything about how Virgil was read (T1).

(●) c. 37 BC: Seven years went into four books about farming, written the way a bear licks a cub into shape. + The Georgics take their name from the Greek for "working the earth," and on the surface they are a manual: when to plough, how to graft a vine, how to read the weather, what to do when the cattle sicken, how to keep bees. Underneath, they are about work, loss, and how much order costs. The composition method is one of the best small stories in ancient literature. He would "dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number," and he joked that he wrote "after the manner of a she-bear," gradually licking his poem into shape. Seven years for about two thousand lines works out to under a line a day. In 29 BC Augustus came home from the east, two years after Actium, the sea fight off the western coast of Greece in which he had broken the fleets of Antony and Cleopatra and made himself master of the Roman world, and he stopped at Atella in Campania to rest a sore throat. Virgil read him the whole poem there over four days, "Maecenas taking his turn at the reading whenever the poet was interrupted by the failure of his voice." Maecenas was one of Augustus’ closest friends and the man who quietly paid for half the poetry of the age; the Georgics are dedicated to him, so the man taking over the reading was the man the poem was written for. Two men with bad throats and a book about bees, in the week the Roman world changed hands.

(●) 29 BC: He gave the last ten years of his life to the Aeneid, and it was still unfinished. + The Aeneid is twelve books about a defeated man. Aeneas gets out of burning Troy carrying his father on his back and leading his small son by the hand, loses his wife in the smoke, wanders the Mediterranean for seven years, loves and abandons the queen of Carthage, goes down alive into the land of the dead, and finally fights a war in Italy for a country he has never seen and will not live long to enjoy. Out of that line, the poem says, comes Rome. He began it as soon as the Georgics were done and was still at work on it when he died ten years later. The ancient Life allows the poem twelve years, which is more than the calendar between the two books has to give. He read three books aloud to Augustus, the second, fourth and sixth. Augustus’ sister Octavia was in the room for the sixth. Her son Marcellus, the young man everyone assumed would succeed the emperor, had recently died, and when Virgil reached the lines about him "she fainted and was with difficulty revived." The poem was never signed off. A line of the Aeneid runs to six measured feet, a fixed length a Roman ear counted without thinking about it, and something close to sixty lines in the poem simply stop partway along, where the metre gives out and the sentence does not. Any modern edition prints them as they stand, so a reader can still put a finger on the places where the work halted. That is the state the book was in when he decided he needed three more years.

(●) 19 BC: He died at Brundisium asking for the poem to be burned, and Augustus overruled him. + The plan was three years in Greece and Asia, polishing, with nothing else to do. Before he sailed he made Varius promise that "if anything befell him his friend should burn the Aeneid," and Varius "emphatically declared that he would do no such thing." At Athens he met Augustus coming home from the east and decided to travel back with him. On a day trip to nearby Megara, in hard sun, he caught a fever; the crossing made it worse; he died at Brundisium, the port on the heel of Italy, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of October. The Kalends were the first day of a month, and a Roman in the back half of a month dated by counting back toward the Kalends ahead of him, with those Kalends counted as the first day of the reckoning, so the eleventh day before the Kalends of October comes out as the twenty-first of September, 19 BC. He was fifty, less than a month short of fifty-one. The ancient Life puts him in the fifty-second year of his age when he set out for Greece, which does not quite square with the birth date the same Life gives a few paragraphs earlier, and the two figures have sat in that one short book ever since, unreconciled. In the illness he "constantly called for his book-boxes, intending to burn the poem himself; but when no one brought them to him, he made no special request about the matter." His ashes went to Naples and were buried on the road toward Puteoli, under an epitaph he is said to have composed: "Mantua gave me the light, Calabria slew me; now holds me Parthenope. I have sung shepherds, the country, and wars." Calabria in the old geography is the heel of Italy, where Brundisium stands, and Parthenope is the Greek name for Naples, so the first line runs through three places in order, the town that bore him, the province that killed him, the city that keeps him. The second line runs through his three books in the order he wrote them. Augustus set the will aside and put the book into the hands of Varius and Plotius Tucca, and Varius published it "making only a few slight corruptions, and even leaving the incomplete lines just as they were." Within a generation Roman schoolboys were parsing him, and they never really stopped.

What He Taught

(T1) A child is coming, and at his birth the age of iron ends and the world begins again. + Picture the year. It is 40 BC, Rome has been tearing itself apart for a decade, and two warlords have just patched up a treaty at Brundisium that everybody hopes will hold. Asinius Pollio, the consul who helped broker it, is a friend of Virgil’s. Into that moment the poet drops a short poem promising that a boy is about to be born who will change the terms of human life. The poem calls its authority the Cumaean Sibyl. A sibyl was a prophetess; the one at Cumae, on the bay of Naples, was the most famous in Italy, and Rome kept a collection of her oracles under state guard and consulted them in emergencies. Virgil says her last age has arrived. At the boy’s birth the race of iron gives out and a golden race rises; the serpent dies; the soil bears without being worked; the wool grows already dyed on the sheep’s back; the ox has nothing to fear from the lion. The last thing the poem asks is that the baby should smile at his mother. Who was the boy? Nobody knows. The old guesses run through the children of Pollio, of Antony and Octavia, of Octavian himself, and the honest answer may be that Virgil had no particular infant in mind and was writing the hope rather than the birth announcement. What he thought was happening, though, is the part that decided everything that came afterward. His golden age arrives because the wheel has come round: "the great cycle of periods is born anew." Saturn, who in the old stories had ruled the world in its first and easiest age, when nobody had to work for his dinner, comes back to rule it again, as he has before and will again. That is a poem about a world that repeats itself, the way one year turns over into another and the same spring comes back. The Christians who read it three and a half centuries later heard something else in it altogether: not a world coming round again, but a world beginning.

(Q) "Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy: the great cycle of periods is born anew. Now returns the Maid, returns the reign of Saturn: now from high heaven a new generation comes down." + Source: Virgil, Eclogue 4.4–7 (Mackail translation, 1889). "The Maid" is Justice, who in the old story lived among men in the golden age and left the earth in disgust when men grew wicked. Her coming back is the sign that the age has turned. These four clauses are the most argued-over sentence in Latin poetry.

(T2) History has a direction, and Rome is where it is going. + The word the Aeneid leans on is fatum, which we say as "fate" and hear as blind bad luck. That is not what it meant. Fatum is literally "the thing that has been spoken," a decree that has been uttered and therefore stands, the way a verdict stands once the judge has read it out. Aeneas is not unlucky. He is under orders. The poem is honest about the price of being under orders. Its first hundred lines are a tally of losses: a city burned, a wife gone, a fleet scattered by a goddess who hates him, seven years of sailing to nowhere in particular. Then, in the middle of all that wreckage, Aeneas’ mother Venus goes to Jupiter to ask what it is all for, and he tells her. Other empires are given a term, a stretch of years and a set of borders, the way a lease has a date on it. This one, he says, is given none. A Roman hearing that under Augustus would have felt the ground steady under him. It is also the most extravagant claim in the poem, and the one the Christian centuries would have the most trouble with, because Scripture had already told a different story about how long the great empires last.

(Q) "I appoint to these neither period nor boundary of empire: I have given them dominion without end." + Source: Virgil, Aeneid I.278–279 (Mackail translation, 1885). Jupiter is comforting Venus, who has watched her son shipwrecked and wants to know when the promise will be kept. "Period" here means a time limit, and "boundary" a limit in space: no clock and no frontier.

(T3) Duty comes before desire, and it costs the man who obeys. + Aeneas is introduced with an adjective attached, pius, and it follows him for twelve books. Pietas is not piety in the modern devotional sense, the sense of a man who prays a lot. It is the settled discharge of what you owe: to the gods, to your father, to your household, to your country, roughly in that order, whether or not you feel like it on the day. The picture of it in the poem is Aeneas walking out of a burning city with his old father on his shoulders and his little boy’s hand in his. Book four is what that virtue costs. Shipwrecked at Carthage, Aeneas and its widowed queen Dido fall in love, and for a season he stops being a refugee and starts being a consort, helping raise the towers of somebody else’s city. Then Mercury, the messenger of the gods, arrives with an order from Jupiter, and Aeneas begins, quietly, to make arrangements to leave. Dido finds out, and the confrontation that follows is the most quoted scene in Latin literature: she accuses him of everything he has in fact done, and he answers her with the flattest sentence in the poem. She kills herself on a pyre built out of his own belongings, and with her last breath she calls down an avenger on his descendants, someone to rise out of her bones and hunt them. Every Roman reader knew who that was. It was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who brought an army and its elephants over the Alps and came nearer than anybody else ever did to finishing Rome off. Virgil does not let his hero off. Aeneas obeys, and the obedience is right, and it wrecks a woman who deserved better, and the poem makes you watch. Two books later Aeneas meets Dido again among the dead and tries to explain himself, and she turns her back and will not answer him.

(Q) "Cease to madden me and thyself alike with plaints. Not of my will do I follow Italy." + Source: Virgil, Aeneid IV.360–361 (Mackail translation, 1885). "Plaints" are complaints, laments, the words of somebody pleading. It is the last thing Aeneas says to Dido before he goes down to the ships, and readers have been split for two thousand years over whether it is the truth spoken badly or a cold man hiding behind orders.

(T4) The world is full of grief, and the poem refuses to look away from it. + Early in book one, Aeneas washes up at Carthage, a city he has never visited on a continent he has never seen, and walks into a half-built temple. On its walls, painted, is the Trojan war. His war. His friends, named and recognisable, dying in the order they died. A stranger’s city on the far side of the sea has already heard the story and made art out of it. His reaction is the line everyone knows, three Latin words, sunt lacrimae rerum, over which translators have been quarrelling since the Renaissance. It can mean "there are tears for things," or "things have their tears," or "there are tears at the heart of things." Aeneas takes it as a comfort, oddly: if these people wept over Troy without ever having been there, then he is among human beings, and human beings can be appealed to. That instinct runs through everything Virgil wrote. The losers get lines. Dido gets a whole book and the best speeches in it. Turnus, the enemy, gets a father, a sister and a case. The Georgics stop the farming advice cold to describe a livestock plague in the Alps that kills the ox at the plough and the shepherd with his flock, and turn at the last to Orpheus, the singer who went down into the world of the dead to fetch his wife Eurydice, was told he could have her back if he did not look round on the way up, and looked round. It would be too much to call this compassion in the Christian sense; Virgil offers no remedy and does not pretend to have one. But no other pagan poet looked so steadily at what suffering actually does to people, and Christian readers have always felt it.

(Q) "Behold Priam! Here too is the meed of honour, here mortal estate touches the soul to tears." + Source: Virgil, Aeneid I.461–462 (Mackail translation, 1885). Priam was the old king of Troy, butchered at his own altar on the night the city fell, and Aeneas has just found him painted on a Carthaginian wall. A "meed" is a reward or a due: even here, among strangers, worth is given its wages.

(T5) Work is the law of the world, and a god imposed it on purpose. + Anyone who has kept a garden knows the feeling behind the first book of the Georgics. You do not fight weeds once. You fight them every year, and the year you stop, the plot goes back to what it was. Virgil asks why, and gives an answer that is close to a theology. Under Saturn, in the old golden age, nobody farmed. There were no boundary stones, no ploughs, no ownership; the earth simply produced, and men gathered. Then Jupiter took the age away, and the poem insists he did it deliberately and for a reason: to stop the human race dozing. He put venom in the snake, made wolves hunt, hid fire in the flint, and let the acorns fail in the sacred wood so that hunger would force men to invent. Ploughing, grafting, sailing, forging, the calendar, the reading of weather signs: all of it came out of that pressure, and none of it would have come without it. Christian readers meet Genesis 3 a page later in their memory and notice both the overlap and the gap. Both accounts say that the ease is gone and the ground now has to be fought for. But Genesis calls the hardness a curse that follows a rupture between a man and his Maker, with a promise attached, while Virgil calls it a policy: a god sharpening his creatures because a comfortable world is a sleepy one. Nothing in Virgil is broken, and so nothing in Virgil needs mending.

(Q) "Our Lord himself willed the way of tillage to be hard, and long ago set art to stir the fields, sharpening the wits of man with care, nor suffered his realm to slumber in heavy torpor." + Source: Virgil, Georgics 1.121–124 (Mackail translation, 1889). "Tillage" is working the soil; "torpor" is sluggishness, the numbness of something half asleep. Mackail’s "Our Lord himself" translates Virgil’s pater ipse, "the Father himself," which in the poem means Jupiter. A few lines further on comes the line that became a Latin proverb, that nothing "but yielded to unrelenting toil and the hard pressure of poverty."

(Q) "Be thy charge, O Roman, to rule the nations in thine empire; this shall be thine art, to lay down the law of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down." + Source: Virgil, Aeneid VI.851–853 (Mackail translation, 1885). Aeneas has gone down alive into the world of the dead, and his father Anchises is showing him the souls of Romans not yet born. Let other nations sculpt and argue and chart the stars, he says; this is yours. It is the closest thing the ancient world produced to a mission statement for an empire, and Augustine would quote its last clause on the first page of the City of God and hand it straight back to God (†3).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) An emperor, an apologist and a bishop all read the Fourth Eclogue as prophecy. + The boldest Christian reading of the poem comes from a speech, the Oration to the Assembly of the Saints, handed down with the works of Eusebius and traditionally ascribed to the emperor Constantine, though scholars have long argued about the attribution and the date. Its chapter on Virgil is headed with the whole thesis: that the prophecy "was not the Fiction of any Member of the Christian Church, but the Testimony of the Erythraean Sibyl," that "Virgil makes mention of the same, and of the Birth of the Virgin’s Child," and that he "spoke obscurely of this Mystery from Fear of the Ruling Powers." The speaker goes through the Latin line by line, and explains the obscurity as self-preservation, "lest any of the powerful in the imperial city might be able to accuse the poet of writing anything contrary to the laws of the country." The Erythraean sibyl named there is a different prophetess from the Cumaean one Virgil actually names (T1), a figure from the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and the speech is untroubled by the difference. Lactantius used the poem differently, and more soberly, and he had used it before that speech was ever delivered. He was tutor to Constantine’s son and the most elegant Latin apologist of his generation, and his Divine Institutes came first, which is worth keeping straight: the careful use of the poem is the older one, and the line-by-line decoding came along after it. In the Divine Institutes VII.24 he is describing the renewed world at the end of history, and he simply reaches for Virgil’s picture of it and names the source: the sailor leaving the sea, the ploughman loosing his bulls from the yoke, the blushing grape hanging on the uncultivated brambles, the herds with nothing to dread from huge lions. He is not claiming Virgil was a prophet. He is claiming that Virgil, drawing on the Sibyl, had described something real without knowing what it was. Augustine is the most careful of the three. In the City of God X.27 he takes up the couplet promising that "if any traces of our crimes remain, they shall be obliterated, and earth freed from its perpetual fear," and grants the words their full weight before turning them. Virgil, he says, did not invent this; he had it from the Cumaean Sibyl, as the poet all but admits when he opens with the last age of the Cumaean song. And the traces of our crimes, the residue that clings to even the best life, are obliterated by one Saviour and no other, which is more than any Roman child could do. It is worth being plain that the modern reading of the poem is not the one any of the three defended: Virgil was writing about a Roman birth in a Roman year, in the standard vocabulary of court poetry. What the fathers claimed was not that he knew, but that he was reaching for something that turned out to exist.

(†) For a thousand years, learning to read Latin meant reading him, and the church did the teaching. + Within a generation of his death Virgil was the standard schoolbook of the Roman empire, the text on which children learned grammar, metre and the meaning of words. When the empire became Christian, the schoolrooms did not change their books. That is why Latin Christendom had a continuous literary language at all, and it is why the Aeneid comes down to us complete in manuscripts copied out by monks who were not, on paper, its natural friends. The fathers were not comfortable about it, and said so. Augustine remembers being made to weep in class over Dido’s suicide, and turns the memory into an indictment of himself in Confessions I.13: what is more wretched, he asks, than a man "shedding tears over the death of Dido for love of Aeneas, but shedding no tears over his own death in not loving You" (Pilkington’s translation)? Jerome asked flatly, in the long letter of advice he sent to a young Roman woman named Eustochium, "How can Horace go with the psalter, Virgil with the gospels, Cicero with the apostle?" The psalter is the book of Psalms, the collection a Christian of Jerome’s sort knew by heart, and each of his three pairs sets a pagan book against a Christian one on the same shelf. He went on in the same letter to report the fever-dream in which he stood before a judge, said he was a Christian, and was told, "You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ" (Letter 22.29 and 22.30, Fremantle’s translation). Both men went on quoting the poets for the rest of their lives. The strangest tribute came from a Roman noblewoman. In the middle of the fourth century, Faltonia Betitia Proba wrote the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, a retelling of Genesis and the Gospels stitched together entirely out of Virgil’s own lines and half-lines, rearranged so that the words of the Aeneid narrate the creation, the fall, the nativity and the crucifixion. A cento is a patchwork poem, made from another poet’s pieces the way a quilt is made from old clothes. Her stated aim was to show that Virgil had sung the deeds of Christ. It is not an argument anybody would make today, and as a piece of devotion it tells you exactly how deep in the Christian ear those lines were.

(†) Dante made him a guide who could lead as far as reason goes, and not one step further. + Dante did not invent the arrangement by which a Christian keeps Virgil and puts him in his place. Augustine had set that pattern nine centuries earlier. On the first page of the City of God he quotes Anchises’ charge to the Roman, the command to spare the conquered and crush the proud, in the couplet Dods renders "Show pity to the humbled soul, / And crush the sons of pride," and observes that this is God’s prerogative, which a city ruled by its own lust of rule has taken for its motto. The line is not dismissed. It is taken away from Rome and given back to its owner. Nine centuries later Dante built the whole architecture of his poem out of the same judgment. Lost in the dark wood, he is rescued by Virgil, who guides him down through hell and up the mountain of purgatory and as far as the garden at its summit, crowns him lord of himself there, and then quietly vanishes when Beatrice arrives, the woman Dante had loved and lost as a young man, who takes over the guiding from that point on. Virgil stops there because that is the border reason cannot cross. Dante’s Virgil lives in Limbo, the first circle, where there is no torment and no hope, among the great pagans who lacked the one thing needful. And in the middle of purgatory Dante stages the scene that gathers the whole tradition into seven lines. The Roman poet Statius, who wrote his own epic about a century after the Aeneid and has just finished his penance on the mountain, tells Virgil that the Fourth Eclogue made a Christian of him, and gives the image that has stuck to Virgil ever since: "Thou didst as he who walketh in the night, / Who bears his light behind, which helps him not, / But wary makes the persons after him, / When thou didst say: ‘The age renews itself, / Justice returns, and man’s primeval time, / And a new progeny descends from heaven.’ / Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian" (Longfellow’s translation of Purgatorio XXII). A man carrying a lamp at his back, lighting the road for everyone except himself.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: an empire without end, a wheel that turns, souls sent back, and a mercy that runs out. + The ledger has another column, and it is best kept in Virgil’s own words rather than in what later readers did with them. - An empire without end. Jupiter promises Rome dominion with no time limit and no frontier (T2). Six centuries earlier a Jewish exile in Babylon had been shown a succession of world empires and a stone cut without hands that smashed the lot: "And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed" (Daniel 2:44). Only one of those two claims is still standing. - A wheel, not a road. The golden age of the Fourth Eclogue arrives because the cycle has come round again, and a cycle that has come round can come round once more (T1). Scripture’s claim is not that the world repeats but that something happened once and will not be repeated: Christ "has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Hebrews 9:26), and the end of the story is not Saturn’s reign restored but the one seated on the throne saying, "Behold, I am making all things new" (Revelation 21:5). - Souls sent back. In the sixth book Anchises explains the crowd by the river: these are "souls, for whom second bodies are destined and due," waiting their turn at Lethe, the river of forgetting, and drinking "the heedless water of long forgetfulness" before they go up and live again. Scripture allows no second run: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - A mercy that runs out. Anchises told the Roman to be merciful to the conquered. Virgil ends his poem by having his hero do the opposite. Turnus, beaten and on the ground, says "I have deserved it, nor do I ask for mercy," and begs only that his old father be spared the sight. Aeneas is wavering. Then he catches sight of a sword-belt on his enemy’s shoulder, stripped from the body of Pallas, the young ally Aeneas had promised to bring home safe and Turnus had killed, and at the sight of it he kills him where he lies. The Aeneid ends on the line that follows the blow: "and with a moan the life fled indignant into the dark." Against that, the Sermon on the Mount: "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), and Paul on the belt of Pallas and every keepsake like it, "never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God" (Romans 12:19). Virgil saw more of the cost of empire than the empire wanted seen, and he wrote a poem that keeps flinching at its own conclusion. What he could not supply was a reason for the flinch. The child he announced in 40 BC never came; the one who did come was born in a province Rome was still administering, was killed by the empire without end, and did not stay dead.