A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Constantine I or his speechwriter had already noted this in one of the Emperor’s very first speeches to Christians after his conversion to the faith. That was Virgil’s passport to a central place in medieval Western Christian literature, symbolized by his role as Dante’s guide through the underworld in the great fourteenth-century poem Inferno.20 Dante’s homage was anticipated in the fourth century by a conscientious Christian senator’s daughter. Her resoundingly aristocratic name, Faltonia Betitia Proba, proclaimed her ancient lineage, but she was also blessed with a good education and a pride in the Roman past. She took it upon herself as a labour of love to meld together little fragments of Virgil’s poetry into a sort of literary quilt (cento in Roman usage),