Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 84-85:
Erasmus called him "the Christian Virgil" not only because both the ancient poet and his modern imitator came from Mantuan, but also because the explicitly Christian content of his eclogues avoided some of the problems that occurred when pagan texts were prescribed to schoolboys.Read Mantua for Mantuan.