Corydon is a stock name for a shepherd in ancient Greek pastoral poem

Pastoral

The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...

s and fable

Fable

A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized , and that illustrates a moral lesson , which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from...

s, such as the one in Idyll 4 of the Syracusan poet Theocritus

Theocritus

Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...

 (c.310-250 BCE). The name was also used by the Latin poets Siculus

Titus Calpurnius Siculus

Titus Calpurnius was a Roman bucolic poet. Eleven eclogues have been handed down to us under his name, of which the last four, from metrical considerations and express manuscript testimony, are now generally attributed to Nemesianus, who lived in the time of the emperor Carus and his sons .Hardly...

 and, more significantly, Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

. In the second of Virgil's Eclogues, it is used for a shepherd whose love for the boy Alexis is described therein. Virgil's Corydon gives his name to the modern book Corydon

Corydon (book)

Corydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately published from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in 1924 and in the United...

.

Corydon is mentioned in Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queen as a shepherd in Book VI, Canto X. In this section he is portrayed as a coward who fails to come to the aid of Pastorell when she is being pursued by a tiger.

The name is again used for a shepherd boy in an English children's trilogy (Corydon and the Island of Monsters, Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis and Corydon and the Siege of Troy) by Tobias Druitt

Tobias Druitt

Tobias Druitt is an author of fantasy novels. Tobias Druitt is the pseudonym of two authors who write together, Diane Purkiss and Michael Dowling....

. http://www.amazon.com/dp/037583382X

Corydon is also the name of a shepherd in a Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 hymn

Hymn

A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...

 entitled Pastoral Elegy

Pastoral Elegy

The Pastoral Elegy is a hymn from the "Old Missouri Harmony Songbook". The Town of Corydon, Indiana is named after a person in this hymn. The mournful, period song tells the tale of a young shepherd boy named Corydon who died....

. The town of Corydon, Indiana

Corydon, Indiana

Corydon is a town in Harrison Township, Harrison County, Indiana, United States, founded in 1808, and is known as Indiana's First State Capital. After Vincennes, Corydon was the second capital of the Indiana Territory from May 1, 1813, until December 11, 1816. After statehood, the town was the...

 is named after the shepherd of that hymn.

Corydon and Thyrsis are a pair of shepherds in Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...

's 1920 play, "Aria da Capo". http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5790/5790.txt

Other such stock names in poetry include:

• a Rooster = Chaunticleer (from French
  French language
  French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
  
   Chanticler; [chant + clear, in reference to its crow])
• a Fox = Reynard (from French Reignart; reign
  Reign
  A reign is the term used to describe the period of a person's or dynasty's occupation of the office of monarch of a nation or of a people . In most hereditary monarchies and some elective monarchies A reign is the term used to describe the period of a person's or dynasty's occupation of the office...
  
   + -ard, "kingly one")
• a Cat = Felix (from Latin felix, "happy" [influenced by Latin feles, "cat, feline
  Felidae
  Felidae is the biological family of the cats; a member of this family is called a felid. Felids are the strictest carnivores of the thirteen terrestrial families in the order Carnivora, although the three families of marine mammals comprising the superfamily pinnipedia are as carnivorous as the...
  
  "])
• a Dog = Rufus (from Latin rufus, "red" [influenced by ruff, the bark of a dog])