a virtuous pagan, a term referring to pagans who were never evangelized and consequently during their lifetime had no opportunity to recognize Christ, but nevertheless led virtuous lives, so that it seemed objectionable to consider them damned. Eventually, some Christians sought to reconcile Virgil's works with the supposed Christianity present in them. Consequently, during the Late Antiquity and beyond, many assumed that the puer referenced in the Fourth Eclogue was actually Jesus Christ. History Early interpretations According to Classicist Domenico Comparetti, in the early Christian era, "A certain theological doctrine, supported by various passages of [Judeo-Christian] scripture, induced men to look for prophets of Christ among the Gentiles". This inevitably resulted in early Christians looking to the works of Virgil—a famed poet who, even in late antiquity had immense clout in Roman society—for any sign of prophecy. Eventually, there arose a belief that Virgil's Fourth Eclogue foretold the birth of Jesus, which seems to have first emerged during the 4th century. The scholar Steven Benko proposes that this interpretation became so popular around this time (and not earlier) because it "provided [Constantinian Christians] a way to connect to non-Christian society and to give Christianity respectability." The first major proponent that the poem was prophetic was likely the early Christian writer Lactantius, who served as Constantine the Great's religious advisor. In a chapter of his book, Divinae Institutiones (The Divine Institutes), entitled "Of the Renewed World", Lactantius quotes the Eclogue and argues that it refers to Jesus's awaited return at the end of the millennium. He further claims that "the poet [i.e. Virgil] foretold [the future coming Christ] according to the verses of the Cumaean Sibyl" (that is, the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae). According to Sabine G. MacCormack, this quote seems to suggest that while Lactantius believed the poem was a prophecy, he did not necessarily believe that Virgil himself was a prophet, as the poet was merely "reflect[ing] what the Sybil of Cumae and the Erythraean Sibyl had said long before [he] wrote." Constantine himself also believed the poem could be interpreted as a prophecy about Christ. Many copies of the Roman historian Eusebius's Vita Constantini (The Life of Constantine) also contain a transcript of a speech made by the emperor at a Good Friday sermon during the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325), in which the emperor re-imagines almost the entire poem line-by-line as a