Virgil and a bit of Danté 00:03 | 14-08-2026 | Friday I smell something in the air... What's that? A fresh interest in ancient classical literature? An appreciation for the mythical stories of ancient Greece and Rome? You know Homer from The Odyssey. But do you know the Other Literary Giant of the time? I bring to you, some reheated tea from ancient Rome, and nearly two millennia later, some Drama in the circles of classical scholars. Ooh boy. [Dramatic movie trailer flashes] A song with a pretty name. An academic paper so salty, it could salt the ocean. A medieval fanfic, that is possibly the most successful fanfic of all time. Presenting: Virgilia: Time Confuses All Humble Beginnings Picture this: it is a rainy Tuesday. I put on one of my favourite rainy day albums and Lana Del Rey's voice rises and falls in a moody and sweet melody. I have sung along to it a million times, but this is the first time I realize... I don't know what its title means!? What is Arcadia? It sounds like arcade, but I can tell by the rules of etymology that "arcade" was probably derived from "arcadia". From Merriam-Webster: arcadia is a region or scene of simple pleasure and quiet. Synonyms include utopia, paradise and Eden. Looking a little further at popular usage, it signifies the nostalgia for a simpler time and place, to rustic and idyllic beauty. Think shepherds and beautiful maidens, singing songs about the beauty of the mountains and grassy pastures. So where did it come from, and who attached this very specific meaning to it? That is a complicated question. Arcadia Arcadia is a real place in Greece, in the Peloponnese region. It is rural, mountainous and landlocked. The actual place is modest and austere, not really some kind of famous utopian destination, not in ancient or modern times. The paradise fantasy of this place was created solely in literature and art. Take a look at the two Wikipedia articles for the same region: Arcadia and Arcadia In Arcadia by Friedrich August von Kaulbach Landscape of Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece Where did we diverge? Almost every credible source of information will tell you that this can all be credited to Virgil, who wrote the first pastoral poetry that highlighted Arcadia as a paradise. [Wait a minute... Virgil? The dude from Dante Alighieri's Inferno? At the time of first doing this research, that's the only place I knew the name from, and there is a chance you also associated him with Dante from the gay memes. Imagine my surprise when I find out he has been the poster boy of classical literature since Julius Caesar's reign!] Seriously though, if you revisit any of the sources I have linked on Arcadia above, including the dictionary definition, you will find them crediting Virgil with its literary discovery. Even the most prominent ancient Roman literature scholars will sing praises of Virgil's short poetry and how it reshaped our culture. It is ubiquitous - everyone knows Virgil made Arcadia. Remember this, it will add to your disbelief as you find out more. Aside: Can I just say by the way, given all this context of what Arcadia is supposed to be like, Lana's song seems completely crazy. She says her body is like the highways of America, that her lover's fingertips trace like cars. She says "Run your hands over me like a Landrover, in Arcadia". Indeed, America is the ultimate symbol of a simpler time, except with cars instead of sheep, of course. Absolute insane reimagining, I salute it. Virgil As T.S. Eliot famously said, in his lecture "What is a Classic?", "[...] whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one which excludes Virgil – we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him." The greatest of the Latin poets, and the creator of all three of the greatest Latin poems - The Eclogues, The Georgics, and the Aenid epic (his homage to the Odyssey). He was already hailed as a classic author in his own lifetime (a little ironic) and his texts were already taught at Roman schools, fresh out of the oven. Throughout European history, the reverance and fascination for Virgil's works has only grown, and he has been the very figurehead of traditional literature for - not centuries - millennia. He is pretty much your favourite classical author's favourite classical author. He was like Shakespeare to Shakespeare. This is the kind of prestige that is attached to his name (which was originally Vergil by the way, but the Catholic church allegedly popularized the current spelling because it sounds closer to the Virgin Mary. Hilarious) So then, wouldn't it make sense, that he also brought us the myth of Arcadia as paradise? Every scholar who studies the myth itself attributes it to him, no doubt. In a famous essay that was one of the first to dig into the myth, Bruno Snell writes "Arcadia was discovered in the year 42 or 41 b.c. Not, of course, the Arcadia of which the encyclopedia says: ‘The central alpine region of the Peloponnesus [...]. This humdrum Arcadia had always been known; [..] But the Arcadia which the name suggests to the minds of most of us to-day is a different one; it is the land of shepherds and shepherdesses, the land of poetry and love, and its discoverer is Virgil." To this day, it is widely believed that Virgil first created a stylized, glorified version of the place in The Eclogues (a collection of short poetry), specifically in the 10th eclogue. But, let me tell you, my Jury, that this is all wrong. This has all been wrong for the last so many centuries. I am telling you, that this is (in my dramatic opinion) one of the most widespread and serious misconceptions in all of literary history. The Myth of The Myth of Arcadia Enter, a paper with a perfectly boring title, "Virgil and Arcadia", by one Richard Jenkyns. When I stumbled onto this paper, I was sure I wasn't going to find anything new about all this. The JSTOR article was only willing to show me the first page, maybe that's why I kept reading. The paper opens strong, with some bold claims written very politely. Soon, I realized that the opening page was politely declaring war on every Latin literature scholar. The following statements have been paraphrased for clarity and drama. Even scholars who have devoted much time to [studying the Eclogues] continue to hold views, which, upon careful observation, have NO BASIS at all. ... Though [Bruno] Snell says much of permanent value about Virgil's work, [referring to the above essay quote] his statements are simply WRONG ... No poem has been so encrusted with the barnacles of tradition and misinterpretation as these. My aim here, is to scrape some of these off by re-examining the works. He was saying the academic equivalent of "You're all idiots that can't read.". I simply had to know more, to see if he could actually back up these hot takes with textual evidence. After some... arrangements, I was able to source the complete paper. It took time to read completely, because it was dense reading and full of very richly supplemented arguments. And let me tell you, after completing it, I am a changed woman. The case is more than strong, leaves very little doubt that the world got it all backwards this whole time. [Disclaimer: I am not a scholar and am being dramatic for entertainment]. The paper is a bit irreplaceable, I can't boil down the arguments sufficiently to put them into bullet points right here. If anyone feels particularly unconvinced, check for yourself. Each argument requires a fair bit of examination of untranslated text, background on Greek vs. Latin meter, and also background on the politics and culture of the time. However, because I want you all to experience this journey, I will try to boil down the arguments insufficiently. Here is a brief description of where everyone went so gravely wrong, and why dedicated scholars missed the signs - The Eclogues are a set of 10 short poems (short is a highly relative term here). In total, only three of these mention Arcadia, two of them in passing, and the 10th one in more detail. Most of the poems are either set in Italy, near Virgil's hometown, or have no setting at all. While some of them do describe peaceful pastoral locations, they are not necessarily the ones that mention Arcadia. However, the widespread misconception is that the Eclogues are entirely set in Arcadia, which wouldn't make sense, considering Virgil spent most of his life in Italy, and experienced the rural, pastoral life mainly in his hometown. This misconception comes from the fact that the poems do not make their own location immediately obvious, and many modern scholars read these with the preconceived notion that they are inherently linked to Arcadia. But when the text is cross-referenced with prominent geography and Virgil's other works, it becomes quite obvious that they could not have been set in Greece (excluding poem 10). The reason that the scholars were approaching the poems with pre-conceived notions: a famous misattribution by Jacopo Sannazaro. In 1500 AD, Sannazaro wrote the very popular story, Arcadia, where a love-lorn gentleman retires to an idyllic countryside inhabited by cheerful shepherds and shepherdesses. This story is basically the starting point of the confusion, where Sannazaro credited Virgil's poems for inspiring him with this charming landscape, probably referring to the last poem. This too was a misconception, you'll find. The beloved 10th Eclogue is, in fact, set in Arcadia, but the setting is not made important. While it is mentioned as a general rural location with grazing sheep and goats, there is no glorification of the setting as particularly peaceful or beautiful. Arcadia, as the location, is simply chosen because it is rural and remote, and also somewhat exotic to his latin readers. Possibly, Sannazaro created the setting of idyllic Arcadia from a mix of ideas from all the poems, and happened to name it Arcadia. It is true that some of the other Eclogues (1 and 9), which are set in the Italian countryside, do comment on the natural beauty of the landscape and some longing to return, but this was in no way attached to Arcadia. Looking at all the evidence, Virgil did not consider Arcadia special in any capacity. That tradition was started by authors contemporary to Sannazaro. Ironically, some of the poems highlighted the beauty of rural landscape, specifically to contrast it with the political instability of that time. Virgil's own childhood town in the Italian countryside was lost to political bartering with a neighbouring ruler, and these poems were a bittersweet reflection of the temporary nature of the peace of these towns. That makes it all the way more ironic that Sannazaro only took a sort of surface level reading of these descriptions and credited them to Virgil, causing a whole cascade of authors to follow suit, misreading the poems as a simple celebration of landscape. The subtle sarcasm of the poems was flattened by this tradition. Oh my god, I love literary analysis. Anyway, now you can see for yourself that the evidence for the case was strong, and expertly backed up by text. Of course, I tried to find discussion around this paper. It was first published in 1989 in The Journal Of Roman Studies, and Richard Jenkyns is a well-known figure in these circles. However, for some reason, all I have found so far in terms of discussion is silence. No agreements, no refusals, no head-butting - I thought this paper would have caused quite the uproar. Maybe I didn't know how to search effectively; if someone else finds something on the topic, please let me know via the message box (coming soon). But as you can see from all the sources I have mentioned above, this error did not become well known at all. To this day, people continue to happily spread this misconception, in ignorance of this paper. There was one citation I found for this exact paper on Wikipedia, and they cited it to state that Virgil wrote about Arcadia :| Is this all a joke?? About Dante Before I did all this research, I had never known the significance of Virgil being Dante's guide in Inferno. I vaguely knew it was some kind of famous figure, but that was about it. Now I understand. It was self-insert fanfiction with his hero. He wanted to imagine that the great classical author would treat him sooo special in hell (Virgil couldn't go to heaven due to the sin of being born before Christ). Soon, his complex and imaginative fic really caught on in the christian fandom (a little blasphemous if you ask me) and became so famous that it outlived Virgil as a mainstream cultural icon, and little kids (me) came to know Virgil as the guy from Divine Comedy. Imagine if someone wrote self-insert fanfiction of Shakespeare that became so famous that it got turned into a major motion picture, and it replaced Shakespeare as a household name. And then little kids started calling him the love interest from the movie. I wrote my very own epic just now, wow. I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did. See you very soon! Love, Aeish <3