ARCADIA.
     A province in the central Peloponnesus, Arcadia is mountainous and sparsely populated even today. In mythology, it was known as the birthplace of Hermes and the realm of Pan. It was also considered a haunt of Zeus (Jupiter), especially in his adventures with Lycaon and Callisto (the name Arcadia derives from Callisto’s son Areas). Three of Heracles’ labors—the Ceryneian Hind (also known as the Arcadian Stag), the Erymanthian Boar, and the Stymphalian Birds—were undertaken in Arcadia.
     Theocritus and Virgil describe Arcadia as a simple, rustic land inhabited by shepherds and nymphs, demigods and satyrs. Their poems were the fountainhead of the pastoral ideal that has become such a popular subject in the arts, especially poetry and painting. In postclassical treatments Arcadia has been commonly portrayed as a lush land supporting an Eden-like existence similar to the Golden Age, as in the late sixteenth-century works of Philip Sidney in England and of Tasso and Guarini in Italy.
     The idyllic perfection that Arcadia came to symbolize also had a poignant side, a recognition of its unreality, embodied in the phrase “Et in Arcadia ego,” meaning “Even in Arcadia there am I [Death]” (sometimes misinterpreted as “I too have lived in Arcady”). The earliest known depiction, Guercino’s painting of c.1618, shows a pair of shepherds gazing on a skull at a ruined tomb that bears the now-famous Latin inscription as a grim reminder of mortality.

    
    See also Pan; Satyrs; Shepherds and Shepherdesses.