Eclogue 7

[3] A herdsman Meliboeus recounts how, when following an errant goat, he came across Daphnis sitting beneath a tree, along with a goatherd Corydon and a shepherd Thyrsis, by the river Mincius.

However, most more recent scholars have not supported his identifications and they view Eclogue 7 "as a poem about poetry, not about contemporary history and politics".

Although Corydon and Thyrsis are described as "Arcadian", this is presumably a poetic term indicative of their ability in singing, since the scene is set near the river Mincius in northern Italy.

It has been noted that both the name "Corydon" and the phrase "Arcadians both", as well as certain other details in the poem, seem to derive from an epigram by a certain Erucius in the Palatine Anthology (6.96).

[26] Fantazzi and Querbach (1985) give a detailed analysis of each round, pointing out how, in the last round, for example, Corydon chooses euphonious names of trees and includes the names of four gods; whereas although Thyrsis matches the Corydon's pattern skilfully, his four ablative plural words ending in -īs, -īs, -īs, -īs, combined with words containing more than one s like fraxinus and revīsās, introduce an unwelcome hissing sound, and he says nothing about the gods.

[27] Paraskeviotis notes that in this Eclogue, Virgil imitates Theocritus's Idyll 5, in which the goatherd Comatas who begins the contest also wins an unexpected victory.

[31] Symbolically, Cucchiarelli argues, these gods can be seen as representing the two major political figures of the age, Octavian and Mark Antony, and their respective parties.

[32] In Eclogue 4, dated 40 BC, the balance between the symbolism of the two gods can be seen to represent the equilibrium between the two parties achieved at that time (see Second Triumvirate).

In lines 61–2 of Eclogue 7, in the last round of the contest, Corydon also balances the gods, those representing Antony (who claimed descent from Hercules),[33] and those representing Octavian (who claimed descent from Venus): Thyrsis in his reply, however, does not mention any gods, which may be counted as another reason he failed to win the contest.