The Isaiah Acrostic a Student Found in Vergil's Georgics
In an Aeon essay, the author recalls Richard Thomas, who had just given a talk at Baylor University, mentioning that a student of his had discovered an 'Isaiah acrostic' in Vergil's Georgics, a first-century BCE poem ostensibly about farming but really about life and the universe. That remark, the author writes, opened the door to two phenomena in ancient Greek and Latin poetry the author had not really thought about despite a lifelong career in Classics: acrostics and Judaism.
The relationship between the biblical and the classical traditions has always been fraught, the essay notes. Tertullian put the tension bluntly in his attack on pagan writers, asking what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.
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The unease was not abstract. The essay notes that St Jerome felt compelled to abandon the classical authors he loved after a nightmare vision in which the judge accused him of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian.
But Jerome's fear had an escape hatch. The essay points out that Vergil's Fourth Eclogue, portraying the birth of a miraculous boy sent from heaven to inaugurate a new Golden Age, was read from late antiquity until the 18th century as a pagan prophecy of the birth of Christ, which allowed Christianity to assimilate the Classics rather than merely reject them.