Virgil clearly understood the paradoxical irony at the heart of the Idylls; he invokes it, for example, at the end of Eclogue 7. Corydon, the more perfectly “bucolic” of a pair of herdsmen competing in a song-contest, triumphs over his pseudo-heroic partner; he becomes, as a result, the self-defining hero of pastoral song:

There are, however, several important differences between Virgil's poetry and that of his predecessor, and these helped shape the course of Renaissance pastoral. The most important – arising in part from the simple fact that Theocritus was Virgil's predecessor – becomes immediately apparent when we read the first lines of the Eclogues:

If Theocritus, throughout his Idylls, was bringing heroism back home, Virgil is now confronting us with the loss of home and all that it represents. The Roman poet clearly views his own era not only as more limited than that of his model, but also as more turbulent and unsettled.