In monarchical courts, religious rituals and celebrations have often been crucial moments bringing courtiers into contact with the monarch and society at large. There was no specific ‘court religion’ at the Roman court; rather, the household religious practices of emperors and resident members of his court were not differentiated from those in aristocratic households, and individual emperors and courtiers could choose their cult practices. However, certain rituals and festivals within the imperial house were still court occasions, especially the rites connected with the toga virilis ceremony and the Saturnalia. Furthermore, religious rituals in the civic spaces of Rome brought the emperor and members of his court into contact with the populace at large. Roman ideas about the divine realm included ideas about divination. As a result, astrologers and other individuals claiming expertise in divination at times had great power and influence at court.

This chapter looks at an early stage in the construction of the Latin tradition, reviewing the ways in which the early fifth-century Macrobius treats Virgil as a godlike author, constructing his influence along the lines of Christian monotheism while resolutely disavowing any knowledge of Christianity. Macrobius too is constructing his tradition of Latin literature, while positioning himself as a crucial contributor to that tradition – an even clearer example of the self-serving nature of such normative historiographies. The chapter proposes that Macrobius’ willed blindness to the Christian intellectual constructs around him, which nonetheless inevitably bleed into his work, serves as a model for the myopias and occlusions of classical philology as practised today