et in Arcadia aliquis: Arcadia in the Pseudo-Vergilian Copa

et in Arcadia aliquis: Arcadia in the Pseudo-Vergilian Copa

This paper aims to explore the pseudo-Vergilian Copa as a fundamental piece for understanding Arcadia in Roman poetry, presenting an ecocritical approach to the poem. Critics have long been aware of the importance of Arcadia in representations of the countryside in literary tradition but have different takes on the extent to which Vergil himself identified the region as the main setting of the Eclogues (e. g. Snell 1953; Schmidt 1972; Jenkyns 1989). By analyzing one of the poems attributed to Vergil in the Appendix Vergiliana, I will argue that the Vergilian tradition highlights the role of Arcadia in Vergil’s Eclogues, connecting the region to urban gardens, countryside, and idealized natural environments and showcasing its potential to promote social transcendence to humans.

In Copa, a dancing girl invites a tired non-elite traveler to stay at an inn. To convince him, she describes the place, its products, and its surrounding bucolic landscape with multiple intertextual references to Theocritus’ Idylls and Vergil’s Eclogues (Merkle 2005). This bucolic garden is specifically located by the Arcadian Mount Maenalus, showing a post-Vergilian use of Arcadia as the ideal bucolic space. Responding to previous scholarship that denied Arcadia’s role in the Eclogues, I argue that Copa’s comic reading of Vergil’s bucolic landscape attests to the ancient recognition of the region as an important space in the Eclogues, since it elevates humans that interact with it.

The main function of the Copa’s landscape is to convince the traveler to join the innkeeper (similarly to Vergil’s Eclogue 2). The inn’s garden is described as a refuge from a warm road, and therefore the poem reinforces the interpretation of the bucolic as an escape alternative. On the other hand, Copa portrays neither the landscape features nor Arcadia as inaccessible since the traveler may go into the inn if he wants. The bucolic, Arcadian garden becomes a space in which foreigners and travelers can transcend their social status, showcasing the power nature has to elevate all people. The poem also explicitly sets the bucolic landscape in the city (since taverns are urban establishments), closely relating gardens and the bucolic landscape and extending the number of attractions a city can offer to also include the benefits of a natural environment. Although Vergil’s Eclogues (Jones 2010) and other forms of art, such as Hellenistic and Roman topia (landscape decorations used by the elite), explore similarly the effects of mixing oddly real and fantastical representations (cheap wine, cheese, fruits, instruments vs. a Siren, the Maenalus), Copa showcases how non-idealized non-elite individuals might also benefit from the interaction with representations of natural environments. Urban and bucolic space coexist in the same setting, something traditional in Roman culture (Jones 2016), and gardens (and art) are one of the ways of subverting the polarity between city and countryside.

My paper will highlight the importance of studying representations of bucolic landscapes in minor poetry, showing which features other poets considered most prominent in Vergil’s works and identifying roles that were attributed to natural idealized environments in Latin poetry.