Arcadia: Occidente y la Antigüedad

Abstract

In Virgil’s Eclogues, Arcadia has a limited importance. According to Schmidt, the consideration of Arcadia as a main symbol of pastoral poetry begins with Sannazaro’s popular homonymous book, published in 1504. Due to the influence of contemporary philology and especially Bruno Snell’s article “Arkadien: die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft”, released for the first time in Antike und Abendland 1 (1945), the communis opinio today holds that the tradition of Arcadia originated in Virgil and was picked up by Sannazaro in the Renaissance. On the contrary, Schmidt asserts that Arcadia has been discovered three times, and clarifies this statement by moving backwards in his analysis from the contemporary symbolical distortion in classical philology through Sannazaro’s Arcadia up to Virgil. Schmidt’s interpretation produces evidence that philologists interpret Virgil’s Eclogues from a distorted modern sensibility, and thereby convert one Arcadia into the other one: his article is directed against this perspective