Poets' competition as wooing in Virgil's 'Ecologues'

Two shepherds meet, choose a topic and start singing. What in the beginning seems to form the basis of a typical friendly singer-contest turns out to be Mopsus' sophisticated declarations of love to the elder Menalcas, which is used by Virgil for poetic reflections on the making and the power of ver se. Setting aside two equally structured poems the 5th ecologue not only pr esents two different approaches to the same topic (Daphnis) but also contra sts two concepts of poetry, oral and written, and opens a discussion about inspiration and imitation. The reader is invited to detect the interrelatio nship between the two poems and to become the judge of the singing (i.e. lo ve) contest.