The importance of this locus in Western literature is inestimable and finds its greatest expression in Greek and Latin pastoral poetry. In fact, Hesiod identifies himself with a shepherd who grazes his lambs at the foot of Mount Helicon when the Muses come to him with the words that will become his Theogony. In the Eclogues, Virgil speaks of Chromis and Mnasyllos, two fauns (also shepherds) who find Silenus, father of Bacchus, drunk and asleep with an empty pitcher hanging from one hand. In revenge for all the times the old man has deceived them by promising verses, the young fauns tie him down with his own garlands:

Aegle joins their company and seconds the timid pair—Aegle, fairest of the Naiads—and, as now his eyes open, paints his face and brows with crimson mulberries. Smiling at the trick, he cries: “Why fetter me? Loose me, lads; enough that you have shown your power. Hear the songs you crave; you shall have your songs, she another kind of reward.” Therewith the sage begins. Then indeed you might see Fauns and fierce beasts sporting in measured dance, and unbending oaks nodding their crests. Not so does the rock of Parnassus rejoice in Phoebus; not so do Rhodope and Ismarus marvel at their Orpheus.¹

Apart from the veiled sexual threat to the Naiad, which we will discuss in due course, the atmosphere of this eclogue is of incomparable gentleness and merriment, the whole world rejoices and plays like a child while old Silenus sings a brief cosmogony.

The locus amoenus is, of course, inseparable from utopia. In another of his eclogues Virgil offers a description of this topos, which tells of the return of the golden age and the arrival of a messiah that the Christians, arguing the poet had been inspired by the one true god, believed referred to Jesus and which, in all probability, made reference to the son of Gaius Claudius Marcellus and Octavia, sister of Augustus, who would die at nineteen without fulfilling any prophecy:

But for you, child, the earth untilled will pour forth its first pretty gifts, gadding ivy with foxglove everywhere, and the Egyptian bean blended with the laughing briar; unbidden it will pour forth for you a cradle of smiling flowers. Unbidden, the goats will bring home their udders swollen with milk, and the cattle will not fear huge lions. The serpent, too, will perish, and perish will the plant that hides its poison; Assyrian spice will spring up on every soil.²

Whether it be the Arcadia of Pan and his court of Dryads, the pastoral and forest paradises of Virgil and Ovid, the garden of delights of the Roman de la Rose and, more recently, Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings or the eternal gardens in Metropolis, this topos refers to a place that has not been corrupted by the abuses and perversions of civilization, where life is lived in congruence with nature. Thus, this locus developed in firm association with the idea of Christian Paradise and the biblical image of the Garden of Eden.

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1. Virgil, Eclogues. VI. ↩︎
2. Ibid. The messianic promise that Christians found in this fragment of Virgil probably comes from its similarity to Isaiah 11:1-6, which speaks of the arrival of a child who will defend the weak and poor and do justice to the enemies of the country. During his reign: “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” (KJV) ↩︎