⁵ P. Veyne, ‘L’Histoire agraire et la biographie de Virgile dans les Bucoliques I et IX’, Revue de Philologie (1980), 233–57, uses the poems to reconstruct where Virgil’s father had his farm and to interpret Tityrus as a slave entrusted by his master Octavian with a plot of land from which to earn his freedom. But Tityrus is the product of a poet’s imagination, and Veyne is more valuable as commentator on agrarian conditions than for any factual light on the poet.