Saturnalia

What it is

The Saturnalia is a work by the Roman writer Macrobius, written in the 5th century, long after Virgil's death. It imagines a series of scholarly conversations held at a banquet during the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, with speakers discussing many topics including Virgil's learning, rhetoric, and debts to earlier Greek and Latin writers.

A surviving illuminated manuscript copy is held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.

Why it matters

Four of the seven books are devoted entirely to Virgil, showing how later Romans treated him not just as a poet but as an authority on religion, rhetoric, and literary tradition. The work also preserves fragments of other ancient writers' opinions about Virgil, including a letter-fragment addressed to the emperor Augustus about the Aeneid.

Look closer

• Why might later Roman writers have treated Virgil as an expert on so many subjects beyond poetry?
• What does it tell us that this work survives only through a much later manuscript copy?
• What is gained, and what is lost, when we learn about a poet mainly through what later writers say about him?