Macrobius’ Virgils

Abstract This chapter focuses on Macrobius’ use of Virgil. One of the most important topics for the diners’ discussions, Virgil offers a model for the interlocutors’ behaviour and the aesthetic principles of the Saturnalia. Virgil’s mastery of Greco-Roman learning, which he exhibits through a centonic practice of quotation and adaptation in his poetic works, mirrors the Saturnalia’s own habits of reworking and quoting its source material, as well as the diners’ conversations on Virgil, which rearrange quotations of earlier scholarship on Virgil to make new interpretative points. The interlocutors’ interest in Virgil’s vast knowledge of classical culture also creates a new image of the poet, freed from the late antique literary-critical controversies over the value of Virgil’s fiction and his ideologies of empire.