Now we have to choose between clinging immobile to credulity and eliminating almost all the information transmitted about the poet. Virgil almost without a biography turns out to be no less great a poet than he was before, and a stern critical approach to the tales about his life sets the readers of his text no new problems at all.
Publius Vergilius Maro was a northern Italian, from Mantua, whose nomen, Vergilius, shows distant Celtic origins. Even his earliest poetry reveals a formidable literary training; that fact suggests that his parents must have had some means, but where he studied before finding congenial sympathy amid Epicurean sympathizers on the Bay of Naples is not at all clear. Two of the Bucolics (1 and 9) are concerned with shepherds who have lost land in the confiscations (43/42 B.C.). Did Virgil himself lose land, and was it in some way restored to him through the intervention of one or other of the addressees of the Bucolics —that is, Asinius Pollio, Alfenus Varus, and Cornelius Gallus? No one knows. Just possibly when Virgil talks (Georgics 2.198) about the land Mantua has lost, beside the river, where the swans fed, he means "swans" as "poets," that is, himself.
