The Aeneid as ‘Weaker Text’ and Fulgentius’ Radical Hermeneutics

The shadow of Vergil and the tensions of competing interpretations constitute the main concern of this chapter. It first demonstrates that allegorical interpretation, although an established practice in both pagan-classical and Jewish-Christian culture, initially features only as a valued and legitimate interpretative practice when used by each side for their own literature, but is used to discredit the other side in arguments that seek to establish the aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual superiority of one side over the other—subsuming both their texts and their hermeneutics. It then goes on to show that Fulgentius’ Continentia Vergiliana marks the turning point at which a first Christian allegorical reading of a pagan text is executed in the form of a fraught, fictive dialogue between ‘Vergil’ and ‘Fulgentius’, bridging the gap of mutual recriminations of inferiority.