Hiding mysteries from those unable to comprehend them — this is a constant undercurrent in Virgilius' writings: ‘he who has ears to hear, let him hear’. Virgilius wrapped his messages up as thoroughly as any cryptographer. Intermeshing layers veil one another, entangling the reader in the alluring complexities of one level or another — the grammatical doctrine, the parodistic elements, the linguistic oddities, the manifold manifestations of the wisdom tradition, and, it may be, still further levels which await recognition. In Virgilius' characteristic manner the medium mirrors the message. The plethora of genres, levels of meaning, personages, and indeed of messages, contradictory as they may seem, is part — and an important part — of his plea for plurality. The very difficulties entailed in extracting any meaningful message from this extraordinarily rich tangle are intentional: knowledge too easily acquired is despised. Like many a patristic writer, Virgilius preached — and practised — the virtues of making his readers work. But, as we have seen, not all of them were prepared to do this: he himself reports an uncomprehending attack by people who complained that he contradicted himself, whilst the incorporation of many of his more extreme etymologies into glossaries suggests that these were understood more literally than he had intended. Giovanni Polara takes this as a sign of a cultural divide between Virgilius and his readers, the monastic readers of the British Isles failing to grasp the sophistication of an author from the cultural sphere of the erstwhile Roman empire.