Around the end of the fifth century, Ambrosius Macrobius, another grammarian, composed a dialogue called Saturnalia, in which guests at a fictional dinner party discuss the Aeneid. The dialogue offers a picture of Rome's cultured pagan society as it was just before it became Christian. Among the guests at the dinner is a professor named Servius, who in real life wrote a commentary on the Aeneid that, in spite of factual errors, has been a valuable source of information for later scholars.
Following Rome's conversion to Christianity, Virgil continued to be highly regarded. During the Middle Ages, he was thought to have had "a naturally Christian soul" — the conventional expression used to identify a person who, it was believed, would have embraced Christianity but for the accident of having been born before Christ. This conviction was based on the evidence of Virgil's compassionate nature, which is manifested throughout the Aeneid, and on the belief that Virgil had foretold the coming of Christ in the fourth Eclogue, in which he prophesies a golden age of peace and good will ushered in by the birth of a divine child. He also became the subject of many legends that obscured his real importance as a poet by featuring him as a magician with supernatural powers. Still, his works continued to be read; even people who abhorred Rome's former worship of Jupiter, Minerva, and other pagan gods used Virgil's texts to teach Latin grammar and style.
During the European Renaissance — roughly, the 1500s to the 1700s, an era marked by a rebirth of interest in classical art, learning, and literature — both Greek and Roman writers were fervently admired and imitated. Knowledge of the Greek language, which had been lost during the Middle Ages, was once more available. Homer was again read in the original, and Virgil was increasingly and universally admired.
