ninth were written.

The student of Vergil who has once compared the statements of the
scholiasts with the historical facts at these few points, where they
run parallel, will have little patience with the petty gossip which was
elicited from the _Eclogues_. The story of Vergil's tiff with a soldier,
for example, is apparently an inference from Menalcas' experience in
_Eclogue_ IX. 15; but "Menalcas" appears in four other _Eclogues_ where
he cannot be Vergil. The poet indeed was at Naples, as the eighth
_Catalepton_ proves. The estate in danger is not his, but that of his
father, who presumably was the only man legally competent of action in
case of eviction. Vergil's poem, to be sure, is a plea for Mantua, but it
is clearly a plea for the whole town and not for his father alone. The
landmark of the low hills and the beeches up to which the property was
saved (IX.8) seems to be the limits of Mantua's boundaries, not of
Vergil's estates on the low river-plains. We need not then concern
ourselves in a Vergilian biography with the tale that Arrius or Clodius
or Claudius or Milienus Toro chased the poet into a coal-bin or ducked
him into the river.[13] The shepherds of the poem are typical characters
made to pass through the typical experiences of times of distress.

[Footnote 13: See Diehl, _Vitae Vergilianae_, p. 58.]

The first _Eclogue, Tityre tu_, is even more general than the ninth in
its application. Though, of course, it is meant to convey the poet's
thanks to Octavian for a favorable decree, it speaks for all the poor
peasants who have been saved. The aged slave, Tityrus, does not
represent Vergil's circumstances, but rather those of the servile
shepherd-tenants,[14] so numerous in Italy at this time. Such men, though
renters, could not legally own property, since they were slaves. But in