It appears that from the oldest days the worship of Pan had its home in Arcadia, particularly about Mount Mænalus, and that it was already ancient when it was brought to Athens at the time of the Persian Wars. The extant Hymn to Pan, among the Homeric Hymns, which may have been composed shortly after that date, is very remarkable for its idyllic and picturesque tone, and shows that with this worship of Pan were early associated those trains of nymphs and rustic gods, with their piping and dance, which inspired Praxiteles’s inimitable Faun. These images are even transferred by Euripides to the Acropolis, where he describes the daughters of Aglauros dancing on the sward, while Pan is playing his pipe in the grotto underneath (_Ion_, vv. 492, _sqq._). Such facts seem to show a gentle and poetical element in the stern and gloomy mountaineers, who lived, like the Swiss of our day, in a perpetual struggle with nature, and were all their lives harassed with toil and saddened with thankless fatigue. This conclusion is sustained by the evidence of a far later witness, Polybius, who in his fourth book mentions the strictness with which the Arcadians insisted upon an education in music, as necessary to soften the harshness and wildness of their life. He even maintains that the savagery of one town (Kynætha) was caused by a neglect of this salutary precaution. So it happens that, although Theocritus lays his pastoral scenes in the uplands of Sicily, and the later pastoral romances, such as the exquisite _Daphnis and Chloe_, are particularly associated with the voluptuous Lesbos, Vergil, in several of his _Eclogues_, makes allusion to the musical talent of Arcadian shepherds, and in his tenth brings the unhappy Gallus into direct relation to Arcadia in connection with the worship of Pan on Mænalus. But this prominent feature in Vergil—borrowed, I suppose, from some Greek poet, though I know not from whom—bore no immediate fruit. His Roman imitators, Calpurnius and Nemesianus, make no mention of Arcadia, and if they had, their works were not unearthed till the year 1534, when the poetical Arcadia had been already, as I shall show, created. There seems no hint of the idea in early Italian poetry;(137) for according to the histories of mediæval literature, the pastoral romance did not originate until the very end of the fourteenth century, with the Portuguese Ribeyro, and he lays all the scenes of his idylls not in a foreign country, but in Portugal, his own home. Thus we reach the year 1500 without any trace of a poetical Arcadia. But at that very time it was being created by the single work of a single man. The celebrated Jacopo Sannazaro, known by the title of Actius Sincerus in the affected society of literary Naples, exiled himself from that city in consequence of a deep and unrequited passion. He lay concealed for a long time, it is said, in the wilds of France, possibly in Egypt, but certainly not in Greece, and