Arcadia

Arcadia,
a bleak and mountainous district in the central Peloponnese which became, thanks to references in Virgil 's Eclogues, the traditional and incongruous location of the idealized world of the pastoral . Virgil himself was keenly aware of the clash between the realistic and idealizing purposes of the genre, and his use of the term may have reflected this awareness. But the writers who revived the pastoral in the Renaissance knew nothing about the real Arcadia and the idealized landscape reigns supreme in their work.