ABSTRACT
The concept of nature as a thing is, by contrast, characteristically a product of the modern age. R. G. Collingwood argues that the word “nature” in classical times referred primarily to a cosmological principle of “development, growth or change”. The modern conception of nature as wilderness is related to the classical in so far as wilderness is seen as being “primeval,” or “original,” – by implication not yet developed. The classical conception is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of Virgil, the Mantuan poet (70–19 BC) whose verse subsequent generations have regarded as a classic literary model and to which Europeans have returned again and again. Critics often contrasted the natural, ideal qualities of pastoral society with what they regarded as unnatural deviations from normal social development in Roman society. Reversion from the agricultural state to the pastoral is unnatural because it involves a return to a less reciprocal relationship with the environment.
