More recently, Stover has expressed the view that author is likely to be Anicius Hermogenianus Olybrius (identifying the poems with the "Bucolicon Olibrii" referenced in a 15th-century copy of a 9th-century catalogue from Murbach).
Mystes describes a golden age - featuring a prosperous village, with worship, music, dancing and plentiful agricultural produce, without the threat of war and political crisis.
He proceeds to tell of how crops grow from uncultivated land, the seas are not bothered by ships, tigers eat their young and lions submit to the yoke.
[4] However, Hubbard writes that "whilst no one would contend that the Einsiedeln poet was a great master of Latin verse, the poems do exhibit a wide range of learning, as well as a certain imaginative energy and an independence that merit serious consideration in any account of the pastoral tradition"[8] Hubbard notes that "both poems ratchet up the terms of the encomium to a virtual breaking point at which credibility ceases"[9] and that, in each Fragment, such hyperbole is reached through references/allusions to Virgil and his poetry such that "By problematizing Vergil as hyperbolic and not fully believable, the texts problematize the praise of Nero and thus ultimately their own authenticity, bracketed within frames of ironic self-distancing".
[10] Several scholars consider that Thamyras' song refers to a poem about Troy that was written by the emperor Nero (which he supposedly recited, whilst Rome itself burned) and that the fragment is therefore purporting to praise Nero's poetry over and above that of Homer and Virgil (who was born in Mantua).
[11] Watson notes that "two competing shepherds praise the emperor...in terms so extravagant that critics are undecided whether to regard the poem as botched panegyric, or as ironic and derisive".
However, Hubbard notes that "the Einsiedeln poet avoids an overly close dependency and at times even goes out of his way to make clear his familiarity with Vergil's own sources".
[16] Hubbard notes that the later lines of the Fragment recall Virgilian sources more closely, but in fantastical, hyperbolic terms (e.g. the description of lions submitting to the yoke - possibly an allusion to Daphnis' yoking of tigers in Virgil's Fifth Eclogue): concluding that "this rhetorical excess must in some sense be what Mystes meant in worrying about satias".