The biographical tradition asserts that Virgil began the hexameter "Eclogues" (or "Bucolics") in 42 BC and it is thought that the collection was published around 39–38 BC, although this is controversial. The "Eclogues" (from the Greek for "selections") are a group of ten poems roughly modeled on the bucolic (that is, "pastoral" or "rural") poetry of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, which were written in dactylic hexameter. After defeating the army led by the assassins of Julius Caesar in the Battle of Philippi (42 BC), Octavian tried to pay off his veterans with land expropriated from towns in northern Italy, which—according to tradition—included an estate near Mantua belonging to Virgil. The loss of Virgil's family farm and the attempt through poetic petitions to regain his property have traditionally been seen as his motives in the composition of the "Eclogues". This is now thought to be an unsupported inference from interpretations of the "Eclogues". In "Eclogues" 1 and 9, Virgil indeed dramatizes the contrasting feelings caused by the brutality of the land expropriations through pastoral idiom but offers no indisputable evidence of the supposed biographic incident. While some readers have identified the poet himself with various characters and their vicissitudes, whether gratitude by an old rustic to a new god ("Ecl". 1), frustrated love by a rustic singer for a distant boy (his master's pet, "Ecl". 2), or a master singer's claim to have composed several eclogues ("Ecl". 5), modern scholars largely reject such efforts to garner biographical details from works of fiction, preferring to interpret an author's characters and themes as illustrations of contemporary life and thought.