Et in Arcadia Ego

Since the time of the ancients, Arcadia has had been the inspiration for many poets, painters, and writers. A region of ancient Greece in the central Peloponnesus. Its inhabitants, somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, proverbially lived a simple, pastoral life. Any region offering rural simplicity and contentment. The term Arcadia is used to refer to an imaginary and paradisal place.

“Et in Arcadia ego” is a Latin phrase, meaning, “In Arcadia, there I am”, the “I” referring to death, the “Arcadia” referring to paradise.

Arcadia is an actual region of Greece, a series of valleys surrounded by high mountains and therefore difficult of access. In very ancient times, the people of Arcadia were known to be rather primitive herdsmen of sheep, goats and bovines, rustic folk who led an unsophisticated yet happy life in the natural fertility of their valleys and foothills. Soon, however, their down-to-earth culture came to be closely associated with their traditional singing and pipe playing, an activity they used to pass the time as they herded their animals.  It’s the place were caves of Kapsia, located, over three million years old,  said to have been home to the God Pan,  the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs.

In the third century BC, a Sicilian poet, Theocritus, created a literary genre called "bucolic poetry" (from the Greek "bukolos," a herdsman), poems called "Idylls" that used these exchanges of verses by fictional shepherds as a compositional strategy. Mainly, these idealized shepherds recounted their heterosexual or homosexual love affairs and praised the poetry they loved and the master singers they admired. Two centuries later, the greatest of Roman (and perhaps of European) poets, Virgil (70-19 BC), used Theocritus's Greek Idylls in order to create in Latin 10 masterpieces of bucolic poetry, known as the "Eclogues" or "Bucolics." Unlike Theocritus, who had placed his shepherds in Sicily, Virgil locates them back in Arcadia, an Arcadia, however, which has features strikingly resembling those of Northern Italy, where Virgil was born.

Arcadia was a fashionable subject for Renaissance art, Nicholas Poussin, was so enamored of Arcadia; he painted two versions of a painting, using the title;  “Et in Arcadia ego” (Les Bergerer d’ Arcardie)

Maybe the first time this Latin phrase was ever uttered!