Arcadia

Arcadia

**To get to our AP EPHS webpage on Arcadia, check out the following:** Click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28play%29 for the Wiki page. Arcadia and Tom Stoppard. Click http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/stoppt/arcadia.htm#links for the Complete Review link out page. Click http://teachers.edenpr.org/~rolson/ArcadiaWeb/#top for the EPHS page.

Click HERE for some Arcadia pictures and websites!

Arcadia is an actual region of Greece, a series of valleys surrounded by high mountains and therefore difficult of access. In very ancient times, the people of Arcadia were known to be rather primitive herdsmen of sheep, goats and bovines, rustic folk who led an unsophisticated yet happy life in the natural fertility of their valleys and foothills. Soon, however, their down-to-earth culture came to be closely associated with their traditional singing and pipe playing, an activity they used to pass the time as they herded their animals. Their native god was Pan, the inventor of the Pan pipes (seven reeds of unequal length held together by wax and string). The simple, readily accessible and moving music Pan and the Arcadian shepherds originated soon gained a wide appreciation all over the Greek world. This pastoral (in Latin “pastor” = shepherd) music began to inspire highly educated poets, who developed verses in which shepherds exchanged songs in a beautiful natural setting preserved pristine from any incursions from a dangerous “outside.”

In the seventeenth century, the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) used this pictorial tradition to paint one of his most famous canvasses, known as “The Arcadian shepherds” or as “ET IN ARCADIA EGO” (1647). This painting represents four Arcadians, in a meditative and melancholy mood, symmetrically arranged on either side of a tomb. One of the shepherds kneels on the ground and reads the inscription on the tomb: ET IN ARCADIA EGO, which can be translated either as “And I [= death] too (am) in Arcadia” or as “I [= the person in the tomb] also used to live in Arcadia.” The second shepherd seems to discuss the inscription with a lovely girl standing near him. The third shepherd stands pensively aside. From Poussin’s painting, Arcadia now takes on the tinges of a melancholic contemplation about death itself, about the fact that our happiness in this world is very transitory and evanescent. Even when we feel that we have discovered a place where peace and gentle joy reign, we must remember that it will end, and that all will vanish.

Plautus’ grandpa ???

Click HERE for some Arcadia pictures and websites!

Is it Plautus or is it Lightning?

CONGRATS, Mr. OLSON!

ARCADIA HERE HE COMES!

“ET IN ARCADIA EGO”

“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.”

–Tom Stoppard (Septimus, Arcadia, p. 38)

Click HERE for some Arcadia pictures and websites!

FRACTALS!

Check out this website to help you make FRACTALS:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/7959/fractalapplet.html

Hannah, Bernard, Gus

Guess who? and what scene?

Septimus and Jellaby–what scene, do you think?

Thomasina and Septimus

“ET IN ARCADIA EGO”

–Tom Stoppard (Septimus, Arcadia, p. 38)

Lord Byron in Arcadia

George Gordon aka Lord Byron

Although Lord Byron (1788-1824) never appears in Arcadia, much of the plot revolves around him and gossip concerning him. During his short life Byron pursued love, fame, and adventure, became continually enmeshed in sexual and literary scandal, assisted a revolution in Greece (where he died of fever at thirty-six), and, along the way, became one of the major poets of his time.