Crake Fellow Cristalle Watons Lecture at the Owens
March 10 @ 4:30 pm
The Department of Classics is pleased to announce that our 2024-25 Crake Fellow, Cristalle Watson, PhD candidate at the University of British Colombia, will be giving a lecture titled “Disclosing All Mysteries of the Poet: Reading Vergil as Scripture in Proba’s Cento Vergilianus” on Monday, March 10th at 4:30pm in the Owens Art Gallery. All are welcome to attend.
Disclosing All Mysteries of the Poet: Reading Vergil as Scripture in Proba’s Cento Vergilianus
“I will declare that Vergil sang the pious deeds of Christ (Vergilium cecinisse loquar pia munera Christi).” When Proba wrote her Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi (CV) in the mid-fourth century, she drew upon and extended an emerging Christian understanding of Vergil: that his “Messianic” Eclogue 4, and for Proba his poetry in general, foretold the coming of Christ in a similar manner to the Old Testament prophets. In the CV, Proba selects and rearranges short excerpts from Vergil’s works to tell an abbreviated version of the Biblical story. In this lecture, I will examine how Proba reinterprets Vergil’s pagan religious and mythological content to situate it within a Christian worldview: a process I call interpretatio Christiana. I will show that Proba uses six exegetical techniques — literal, allusive, conceptual, typological, contextual, and thematic — to draw deep connections between Vergil’s poetry and the Christian narrative; the CV thus functions as an exegetical Christian commentary on Vergil’s poetry. In doing so, Proba shows herself willing to go far beyond any of her contemporaries in reading Vergil’s paganism as prophetically indicative of Christian truth.
