The cultural formation of Isidore of Seville makes him capable of summing up in his own work the
greatest contributions of the earlier traditions. Indeed, he shows how the Christian message can benefit from
the use of pagan auctores in order to gain confirmation of its absolute validity. Even in the passage of Book
1 in which Isidore expresses his opinion about the Virgilian centones with Christian subject matter (orig. I
39, 25-26), which has Tertullian as its source (praescr. 39 ll. 7-16), he is far from the attitude of suspicion
and rejection which is so typical of the patristic tradition. He cites among others the Cento Probae and an
essay attributed to Pomponius, which C. Bursian proposes to recognize in the Virgilian Versus ad gratiam
Domini (AL 719a R.), handed down exclusively by the codex Vaticanus Palatinus Latinus 1753, in which it
is followed by the Cento Probae, that is, in the same order as they are quoting from Isidorus. Through
careful analysis, it can be assumed that the Isidore’s knowledge of certain portions of the grammatical texts
handed down by cod. Pal. Lat. 1753 is due to an exemplar containing not only the same selection of authors,
but also including these two centones.
