Ten years ago, one of the most disruptive events in my intellectual life occurred at a dinner party at my house. My friend Richard Thomas, who had just given a talk at Baylor University, mentioned that a student of his had discovered an 'Isaiah acrostic' in Vergil's Georgics, a 1st-century BCE poem ostensibly about farming but really about life and the universe. This remark simultaneously opened the door to two phenomena in ancient Greek and Latin poetry that I had not really thought about, despite a lifelong career in Classics: acrostics and Judaism. The relationship between the biblical and the classical traditions has always been fraught. As Tertullian testily asked in his screed against pagan writers: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' Similarly, St Jerome felt compelled to abandon the classical authors he loved after a nightmare vision in which the judge accused him of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian. One of the many reasons Vergil is central to the Western t