Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of shepherds. In art, be it literature, painting, or another form, it refers to rural subjects such as villages, herdsmen, and milkmaids, that are romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner.
The pastoral genre was invented in the Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet Vergil adopted the invention and wrote eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser and William Wordsworth, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration. A typical mood is set by Christopher Marlowe's well known lines from "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":
Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually had Greek names like Poliphilus or Philomela. Pastoral poems were often set in Arcadia, a rural region of Greece, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores were held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and backgrounded, and to leave the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure. This made them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spent their time chasing pretty girls – or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Vergil's second eclogue, Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely homosexual.