The Eclogues by Virgil

Author:Virgil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141962795
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

ECLOGUE VII

The goatherd Meliboeus soliloquizing remembers how he happened to be present at the great singing-match between Corydon and Thyrsis. He then quotes from memory their actual songs (six rounds of matching quatrains) and recalls that Daphnis as judge declared Corydon the winner.

This Eclogue is based on pseudo-Theocritus Idyll VIII, though there the quatrains are not in hexameters but in elegiac couplets. Scholars argue about why Thyrsis loses. The common reader may feel that despite the very close parallelism of his quatrains with Corydon’s, they are less musical and sometimes cruder in content; for the best discussion see Skutsch (1971).

Ambrose Philips imitates this and Eclogue III in his ‘Sixth Pastoral’; nothing ‘namby-pamby’ there. Here is a specimen (61–4):

Soft on a cowslip bank my love and I

Together lay; a brook ran murmuring by:

A thousand tender things to me she said;

And I a thousand tender things repaid.

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