His origin was certainly humble enough to hide him from fate. He was born (B. C. 70) the son of a potter, or as some say a farmer, in an obscure little village near Mantua, in northern Italy, and received his early education in the not far away towns of Cremona and Mediolanum. Thence he went to Rome for his higher education, where he acquired the usual accomplishments of the Roman youth. His studies fitted him for the profession of the advocate, but not so his nature. His one appearance at the bar taught him his utter unfitness for that pursuit, for his natural shyness on that occasion quite overcame him. As Ovid tells us of his own experience, the Muses wooed him irresistibly away from the practical pursuits of the "wordy forum," and claimed him for their own. Nature had marked him for a poet. We are told that he was framed on large and generous lines, tall, with the genuine Italian swarthiness of hue, simple and gentle, almost rustic in appearance, with face so suggestive of the purity of character within that the Neapolitans, among whom he loved most to make his home, called him _Parthenias_, "the maiden-like one." Even after he had attained fame, his natural shyness was so great that the popular notice which he attracted upon the streets was a torture to him, from which he always took refuge, as Donatus says, "into the nearest house," as from a hostile mob. The steps which led our poet from obscurity to fame we cannot trace in detail. Local circumstances and his marked poetic ability brought him early under the influence and patronage of Asinius Pollio, soldier, statesman, and littérateur; he was admitted also to the select circle of Mæcenas, to which he himself was privileged later to introduce his friend Horace; and Mæcenas in turn introduced both these poets, so unlike and yet so firmly knit together in the bonds of friendship, to the Emperor Augustus.