Like other enigmatic paintings of the Renaissance, the Louvre's Concert Champêtre has been variously interpreted as either allegory or poesia, and most recently (Christiane Joost­Gaugier, 1999) as a sentimental tribute to Giorgione by Titian by completing an unfinished work of his late lamented teacher and friend. This paper identifies two specific sources of literary inspiration for the figures and setting of the painting in the Augustan poets Horace and Sextus Propertius, and in woodcut illustrations from contemporary printed editions of their works, chosen per­haps by an unknown committente. The Muse with the flute is identified here (in agreement with E. Motzkin) as Horace's Euterpe (Ode 1.1); the other, holding the gleaming pitcher of water and wearing a trailing diadem and a ring, as Calliope, Horace's 'Queen' of Muses (Ode 3.4). Those two musicians, then, the elegant Propertius (with the lute and garbed in red, left) and Horace (the plainer rustic, right) are engaged in a friendly competition as described in Horace's Epistle 2.2 (the unnamed elegist there was identified in the Renaissance as Propertius). The goatherd with a bagpipe (background, right) represents Horace's Faunus, here to visit the Sabine farm from his beloved Arcadia (as the poet boasts in Ode 1.17) and piping to the goats on the slopes of Lucretilis. Calliope stands at the well preparing to consecrate her poet with sacred water as in Propertius 3.3, but the elegist's Hippocrene has been transformed here into Horace's Bandusian spring, with its glassy waters and shading ilex (Ode 3.13). At the far right an ilex shades the figure of Faunus as well. The Sabine landscape Horace loved, with its ilexes, spring, villa, neighbouring towns, hills,even perhaps Tivoli and the River Aniene in the background, is imaginatively recreated by the artist.