Nisbet, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue: Easterners and Westerners" (1978)

R. G. M. Nisbet was a leading Oxford classicist and Latinist whose 1978 article in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies re-reads the apparently Judeo-Christian imagery of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue as explicable through the poet's own access to eastern Mediterranean oracular and Sibylline material rather than through any kind of genuine foreknowledge of Christ. The article situates the poem firmly in its own occasion, most plausibly the consulship of Pollio and the Peace of Brundisium, and represents the settled position of modern classical scholarship against the messianic reading that dominated the poem's reception from Lactantius through Dante and well into the modern period. Use it as the corrective read alongside the ancient Christian sources, not as a claim that the ancient readers were being dishonest, only mistaken about what the poem itself was doing.