Page "Et in Arcadia ego" Paragraph 4

The first appearance of a tomb with a memorial inscription ( to Daphnis ) amid the idyllic settings of Arcadia appears in Virgil's Eclogues V 42 ff.

Virgil took the idealized Sicilian rustics that had first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus and set them in the primitive Greek district of Arcadia ( see Eclogues VII and X ).

The idea was taken up anew in the circle of Lorenzo de ' Medici in the 1460s and 1470s, during the Florentine Renaissance.