Christian portent (although a few are omitted because they overtly reference pagan characters and concepts). Some of Constantine's interpretations are obvious: he argues that the virgo in line 6 is a reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the puer in lines 8, 18, 60, and 62 to Christ, and the serpent in line 24 to the Serpent of Evil. Others are more subjective: For instance, the lions in line 22 represent, to the emperor, those who persecuted Christians, and the Assyrian flower in line 25 represents the race of people, i.e. the Assyrians, who were "leader[s] in the faith of Christ". The emperor also interpreted the reference to Achilles fighting against Troy in lines 34-36 as an allegory for Christ (the "new" Achilles) battling evil (the "new" Troy). Finally, Constantine proposed that lines 37–59 do not refer the birth of a normal, mortal child, but rather to a being who "mortal parents have not smiled upon": in other words, Jesus Christ, who, according to Christian scripture, "had no parents in the usual sense". However, Constantine differed from Lactantius in his opinion of Virgil, arguing that, given all the supposed allusions in this poem, Virgil surely "wrote with full knowledge that he was foretelling Christ", but he "expressed himself darkly and introduced the mention of [Roman] deities to avoid affronting the pagans and provoking the anger of the authorities." Several decades later, Church Father Augustine of Hippo expressed his belief that Virgil was one of many "Gentile ... prophets" who by divine grace had prophesied Christ's birth. Echoing the sentiment of Lactantius, he wrote that the mention of Cumae in line 4 was a likely reference to the supposed Sibylline prophecy concerning Christ. However, Augustine, reasoned that while Virgil may have prophesied the birth and coming of Christ, it was likely that he did not understand the true meaning of what he himself was writing. The opinion that Eclogue 4 was a reference to the coming of Jesus was not universally held by early members of the early Church, however. St. Jerome, an early Church Father now remembered best for translating the Bible into Latin, specifically wrote that Virgil could not have been a Christian prophet because he never had the chance to accept Christ. Jerome further derided anyone who held Virgil as a pre-Christian prophet, calling such a belief childish and claiming that it was just as ridiculous as Christian