This weighty volume is the published version of the doctoral thesis of C., based at the Université des Antilles (Martinique). After a preface by L. Fourcaut, the introduction presents the question of whether Arcadia is a modern invention beginning with Jacopo Sannazaro or whether we can individuate its precise aesthetics in the ancient world – in Virgil in particular. C. immediately clarifies his thesis: the scarcity of explicit references notwithstanding, Arcadia is an invention of Virgil's. The book attempts to convince readers of this theory through an exegetical journey among the three main works of Virgil, which are examined in minute detail. A lexical clarification, one that makes the meaning explicit, is indispensable for the author. Because the term ‘Arcadia’ refers essentially to a place and the setting of several Greek myths, C. intends to treat ‘arcadicité’ instead, i.e. an Arcadian lifestyle and manner of being.
The volume is divided into four parts; the first, ‘Virgile et l'Arcadie: mirage ou réalité?’, treats several methodological questions. The critical line followed by C. sees B. Snell as one of its major exponents (cf. ‘Arkadien, die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft’, Antike und Abendland 1 [1945]): according to this view, Arcadia, with its ideal and unreal character, was originally Virgilian. E. Panofsky's study (‘Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’ [1936]) is cited several times, as is the utopian value that Arcadia has acquired from the evaluation of Poussin's painting. C. begins by reflecting on the fact that – as scholarship has shown since the middle of the last century (cf. F. Cupaiuolo, Tra poesia e poetica: su alcuni aspetti culturali della poesia latina nell'età augustea [1966]) – in the Augustan period the theory of literary genres was obeyed and that therefore no genre could be invented that did not already have precise features. The Epicurean education that Virgil received at Naples together with Plotius, Varius and Quintilius, which permeated his early literary products, intersects with contemporary politics. Once Caesar returned to Rome and the last Pompeians lost the battle of Thapsus, propaganda went out that Caesar would present himself as the restorer of peace and morality – and as a monarch in the most positive sense of the term. To achieve that aim, he put himself forward as a new Evander, a novel Faunus-Pan, thereby acquiring a divine dimension in a particular way through the creation of a third college of Luperci. Setting Rome in a proto-Latin context further permitted its domination of other peoples. Some of these ideals were evoked by a group around Asinius Pollio, in which, beyond the young Virgil, other poets, mostly from Gallia Cisalpina, participated. Arcadia thus seems to become the transfert utopique of Cisalpine Gaul into the Virgilian imaginary (p. 164). This sensibilité arcadienne would have then been aestheticised in Naples, in the ‘Arcadian circle’, which had a tendency to Epicureanism. An Arcadian dimension and an Epicurean one, combined with knowledge of and assimilation to Theocritus, allowed Virgil to metamorphosise Arcadia by endowing it with the characteristics of the idyll and by thus producing a new literary genre, marked by a certain utopian quality. The other three sections of the book, each dedicated to a work of Virgil's, rely on these premisses.
The progression is chronological, beginning with the Bucolics (‘L'Arcadie dans les Bucoliques. Une poétique de la panodie’). This section is subdivided into three chapters in which each poem is paired with the same conception of Arcadia: thus, in the first three Eclogues, which do not contain explicit references to Arcadia, C. maintains that it appears as an idealised and living nature, ‘reconstructed’ in Cisalpine Gaul. The tenth Eclogue is treated separately, because C. considers it the most Arcadian for reason of its landscape, characters and motifs; in it the image of the shadow synthesises the ideal life of the shepherds well. The utopianising technique (p. 480), used in the architecture of the majority of the collection, constitutes the profound sense that Arcadia assumes in the Bucolics.
Part 3 is dedicated to the Georgics (‘L'Arcadie dans les Géorgiques. L’âge arcadien, un anti-âge d'or’), in which, according to C., Arcadia does not disappear, but is simply transformed by changing its political dimension. The work, after all, is dedicated to Maecenas. The farmer of the Georgics, in the same way as the shepherd-poet of the Bucolics, is a teacher whose end is civilisation: Aristeus, in the fourth book, is always called a magister, never a king. From the yearned-for bucolic otium we pass to a solid, organised society, from Pan we pass to Juppiter – equally a pater but decidedly more Roman.
Continuing along the same exegetical path, Part 4 is dedicated to the Aeneid (‘L'Arcadie dans l’Énéide. L'impossible mythe de refondation’). As we begin to see in Book 7, C. argues, Arcadia is traceable through the whole second half of the poem: Virgil reminds us of the Arcadian origins of Latium and Rome through Evander, king of the last group of Arcadians to reach Latium, after the Oenotrians and Pelasgians. In Aen. 8.306–69, most informative for this purpose, Evander strolls in the primitive forum with Aeneas. C. could have brought in useful elements from Propertius 4.1 to deepen the discussion of the archaeological stroll and used studies about the presence of archaic Rome in Propertius’ poetry (cf. P. Fedeli, ‘La memoria della Roma arcaica nella Roma augustea di Properzio’, in: G.M.A. Margagliotta and A.A. Robiglio [edd.], Art, Intellect and Politics: a Diachronic Perspective [2013]). The pan-Arcadian perspective was taken up by Livy, but even more so by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who, in Book 48 of the Antiquitates Romanae, relates the version of the myth in which Aeneas did not reach Italy, but passed through the Peloponnese and spent time in Arcadia (p. 657). Only with Aeneas does Arcadian pacifism decrease: the hero does not reclaim power that he briefly lost, like Odysseus, but he conquers a territory with an army, and the Italian-Trojan conflict that will lead to the birth of the Roman people is in fact a civil war. The epic makes the elegiac poem disappear and thus dissolves the ideal of Arcadia.
In the last chapter, ‘Conclusion générale. L'Arcadie virgilienne’, C. synthesises the main points of his long and cogent argument. Although an explicit description of it is not to be found in Virgil, Arcadia has a poetic dimension with a polysemic character that can be found in all of Virgil's poetry, in which it is integrated and perhaps finds a specific form. Virgilian Arcadianism treats a lifestyle based on Epicurean doctrines about voluptas and has a ‘panodic’ character, not an egoistical one – it always aims at a collective that is made up of shepherds, farmers or, as in the case of Evander's Pallantei, a community of subjects that aims at self-sufficiency, solidarity and justice. In this sense, Arcadia, a utopian dream that is suddenly interrupted, is a conscious process of which Virgil should be considered the inventor.
The volume closes with a rich bibliography, which is subdivided into editions of Virgil, ancient authors, history and religion, Virgil and his world, Bucolics, Georgics and Aeneid, philosophy, poetics and stylistics, and an index of authors cited, characters, ideas, and names of people and places.
In this extended treatment C. has the merit of guiding readers, almost by the hand, through an evaluation of the modalities that Virgil uses to elaborate and inject the theme of Arcadia into his poems, thereby producing an original dimension. The material is treated coherently: each section consists of an introduction, a careful discussion and a conclusion; this structure allows readers to follow the argument easily. C. conceives of Arcadia as a red thread by which it is possible to read through Virgil's entire poetic production and to find the great importance that the poet places on the political dimension and the weight that Caesar's pacifistic ideology would have had on this concept of poetry and of life. The Arcadian ideal, then, diminished with the Trojan-Italian war of the Aeneid and the imperialistic politics put into effect by Augustus. In conclusion, this is a very detailed study, whose size sometimes hides C.'s insights on an important theme that has now been appropriately brought back to the attention of scholars.
