Arcadia (utopia)

The inhabitants of this region bear an obvious connection to the figure of the noble savage, both being regarded as living close to nature, uncorrupted by civilization, and virtuous.

According to Greek mythology, Arcadia of Peloponnesus was the domain of Pan, a virgin wilderness home to the god of the forest and his court of dryads, nymphs and other spirits of nature.

It was one version of paradise, though only in the sense of being the abode of supernatural entities, not an afterlife for deceased mortals.In the 3rd century BCE the Greek poet Theocritus wrote idealised views of the lives of peasants in Arcadia for his fellow educated inhabitants of the squalid and disease-ridden city of Alexandria.

[2] Greek mythology and the poetry of Theocritus inspired the Roman poet Virgil to write his Eclogues, a series of poems with references to Arcadia as the home of Pan, pipes and singing.

European Renaissance writers (for instance, the Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega) often revisited the theme, and the name came to apply to any idyllic location or paradise.

In the 17th century Champlain fixed its present orthography, with the 'r' omitted, and Ganong has shown its gradual progress northwards, in a succession of maps, to its resting place in the Atlantic Provinces".

[5] In 1848, Judge Samuel Treat, of St. Louis described life of the early settlers in the Midwest with the sentence "Each family produced whatever was necessary for its own consumption, and lived in almost Arcadian simplicity.

[10] New York magazine critic Mark Stevens wrote "His [Eakins] joy in the natural body rarely made its way into his major paintings, perhaps because the subject was so personally complex for him.

The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity.

[14] Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests, the cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community.