Virgil took the idealized Sicilian rustics included in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek region of Arcadia (see Eclogues VII and X).

The first pictorial representation of the familiar memento mori theme, which was popularized in 16th-century Venice, now made more concrete and vivid by the inscription ET IN ARCADIA EGO, is Guercino's version, painted between 1618 and 1622.

The woman, standing at the left, is posed in sexually suggestive fashion, very different from her austere counterpart in the later version, which is based on a statue from antiquity known as the Cesi Juno.

[3] Another biographer, André Félibien, interpreted the 'I' to refer to the occupant of the tomb, but still took the overall meaning of the painting to be a reminder that death is present even in idyllic Arcadia.

The meaning of this highly intricate composition seems to be that, from prehistory onward, the discovery of art has been the creative response of humankind to the shocking fact of mortality.

This new meaning of the second version prepared the way for the translation "Auch ich war in Arkadien (geboren)" ("I, too, was born in Arcadia") given by Herder, Schiller and Goethe.

[6] This undated, mid-eighteenth-century marble bas-relief is part of the Shepherds Monument, a garden feature at Shugborough House, Staffordshire, England.