When talking about arts or music the term pastoral refers to what people imagined the life of a shepherd to be like. They called such scenes pastoral. This one's from the Latin word pastor for shepherd. Sometimes people use the word bucolic to describe such scenes. This word comes from the Greek βουκολικόν, from βουκόλος, meaning a cowherd. Arcadia is the traditional setting for the pastoral.
Originating in classical antiquity, and less prominent in the Middle Ages, the genre revived in the Renaissance, and continued to be very important until at least the eighteenth century. From Romanticism onwards, living in a rural and natural setting continued to be a major concern in the arts, but usually without protagonists imagined as farmworkers, the essential mark of the pastoral.
