CHAPTER 2 Daphnis and Chloe

Innocence and Experience, Archetypes and Art

Jean Alvares

Longus offers an apparently simple story in his Daphnis and Chloe, a bestseller among the Greek novels (Reardon 1994, 135; citing Giles 1989). Yet, because of its employment of archetypal elements, evocation of philosophy and religion, dense (and occasionally jarring) intertexuality and manipulation of literary conventions, and multiple implied authors and readers, interpretations of the work are bound up in readerly attitudes. Winkler (1990a, 104) compared himself to an anthropologist in discussing Daphnis and Chloe, but a better comparison would be to a psychotherapist with a sophisticated literary-critical bent. The story is a robust exploration of interactions with desire, not only erotic desire, but also desire for multiple ideal, indeed mythical, longings. It shares with pastoral, its step-parent, the superpositioning of contradictions (on Longus as a pastoral writer, see Effe 1999, 192–193 and Hunter 1983, 1), such as between a supposedly simple depiction of nature and the elaborate artifice employed between muthos and logos, between seriousness and parodic nonsense. Daphnis and Chloe continually and self-consciously reflects upon the elements of its own production and interpretation. All this is performed in the ludic spirit of a comedy of innocence, where the non-innocent world and even trauma are never forgotten, a stance familiar to pastoral (Segal 1981, 12). This story and the later romances present a decentered Hellenism and narratives that accommodate various ways of reading—for example, the morally satisfying conclusion that feature marriage and tableaux of social unity or the individual episodes, side plots, and digressions that proceed in counter to the overarching “ideal” plot (Whitmarsh 2011). Nevertheless, while my analysis will detail many elements that allow the discerning reader to appreciate multiple interlayerings of significance (including some Lacanian perspectives¹), my central “way of reading” will focus on those archetypal mythic patterns, themes, and other elements that make Daphnis and Chloe the most ideal of the ideal Greek novels.

Nothing is known directly about Longus himself (for details on manuscripts, date, and Longus’ identity, see Hunter 2003, 367–370, and 1983, 1–15; Morgan 2004, 1–2). Although “Longus” is a familiar Roman name and occurs in inscriptions, no firm evidence shows that he was from Lesbos, although he may have been familiar with the geography (see Bowie 1985 and Mason 1979, 1995). There are substantial literary reasons for a setting in Lesbos. Longus certainly belonged to the Greco-Romanizing elite of the high empire and participated in that literary movement described (problematically) as the Second Sophistic. The period for the setting of Daphnis and Chloe is Classical or Hellenistic: city-states are independent, can make war on each other, and employ a style of warfare suited to either period. However, the absentee landlord Dionysiophanes and his landed wealth (Saïd 1999, 93–94) recall the Roman Empire more than Classical Greece.

By Longus’ time, the romance had matured and become more innovative (Whitmarsh 2011) compared to such predecessors as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaka. Consider Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, which was probably written close to Longus’ time (Alvares 2006, 1–33). Achilles Tatius employs plot elements familiar from the Greek romance in an often grotesque fashion (Anderson 1982, 23–32; Chew 2000, 57–70), while in Longus these same elements are decidedly (and sometimes comically) trimmed down (Anderson 1982, 41–42; Morgan 2004, 4; also Effe 1999, 191–193). Both Daphnis and Chloe and Leucippe and Clitophon deal extensively with the protagonists’ maturation and their relationship to normative erotic experience and Greek paideia (Anderson 1993; Swain 1996; Whitmarsh 2001). In Daphnis and Chloe, the protagonists, native Greeks, are saved despite a lack of paideia, while the over-sophisticated Clitophon, a Hellenized Tyrian, becomes a proper hero despite his paideia. Both narratives begin with an ekphrasis, but the narrators hold opposite attitudes toward their respective tales: Longus’ frame-narrator is ecstatic and visionary, while Clitophon seems pensive and troubled, and the reader wonders if Leucippe was lost to him after all. Achilles Tatius’ sprawl in Leucippe and Clitophon seems to lead nowhere, not even to secure happiness for the protagonists or much edification for the reader. Daphnis and Chloe, despite its small scale, accomplishes grand aims, a testimony to Eros’ power and to a utopian vision of a reconstructed society that touches the present.

Most notably, Leucippe and Clitophon details the complex process through which the love of Clitophon and Leucippe matures. Longus likewise explicitly makes the erotic maturation from childish innocence to a married and mated couple the central plot development, with nearly all other elements serving that end (Zeitlin 1990). Accordingly, Daphnis and Chloe provides impressive evidence for what Greco-Roman culture thought about desire, its pleasures and obstacles, as well as the nature of sexual identity and the relations between the sexes in their social contexts.

Actual erotic practice, especially urban practice, is clearly problematical, and the narrator’s account, which promises corrective instruction, presents a myth of how Eros himself has made Daphnis and Chloe his personal project. Daphnis and Chloe can be seen as Eros’ second project. Eros was watching over Amyrillis and Philetas (2.5.3); the latter, now retired, cultivates his garden and supervises the pastoral milieu,² but Eros then begins watching over Daphnis and Chloe. Eros is crafting a muthos about Chloe, one celebrated in the shrine that the narrator visits and subsequently in the narrator’s text/offering. Therefore, all happenings, from the children’s’ exposure and rescue to the final recognition of Chloe and their marriage, are part of Eros’ plan, which is that aristocratic youth of excellent pedigree should learn of love and its practices in something like its original innocence amid nature and within the pastoral world, where, protected by rural gods, they will be only gradually introduced to urban culture and its amatory problematics, until their aristocratic origins are revealed and they are wed, creating together a new hybrid, an improved form of behavior and social life for rustics and urbanites alike.

The less-than-reliable frame-narrator constantly idealizes the countryside. However, presumably limited by experiential, temperamental, and ideological factors, showing condescension and even contempt toward the countryside (see Saïd 1999, 83–88), he includes more naturalistic details that the author tends to underplay (Morgan 2003, 178–179, and 1994, 65; Winkler 1990a, 107–112; Reardon 1994, 135–147; Saïd 1999, 97–107; Pandiri 1985, 116–141). Winkler (1991, 20; also Goldhill 1995, 30–45) correctly notes that the violence inherent in Daphnis and Chloe’s “erotic protocols” and that the lives of Chloe (and Daphnis too) are increasingly constricted as they mature. In most classical myth and literature, intense erotic desire leads to tragedy, and in the concrete practice of elite marriages, mutual love had little importance, nor much equality. However, in the romances, love wins out, with more equality between the couple (Konstan 1994). Further, embodied love needs a proper social context to thrive, and thus the romance (and Daphnis and Chloe in particular) incorporates ideal notions about society and culture, as well as pastoral.

A fundamental literary theme connects to the dream of innocence and personal integrity (Frye 1976, 86). The usual threats—rivals, pirates, war—are downplayed in the novel, for the real threat to the questing Daphnis and Chloe comes from the forces of social convention. Daphnis and Chloe details the transition from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. Pastoral often conveys a nostalgic longing for childhood simplicity, projected into the natural, rural landscape, but, as recent scholarship shows, pastoral is not an escape from awareness of the limits and evils of life; it is simply a different way of confronting them (Segal 1981, 6–8). Daphnis and Chloe must move from the world of muthos to that of logos, which corresponds to the divide between fiction and truth, a division the text thematizes (Carson 1998; Hunter 1983, 47, 114; Morgan 1994, 117–119). The realm of muthos and fiction has greater imaginative and emotional freedom, where truer human desire is expressed and even gained, while the world of logos, the Lacanian Word of the Father, can alienate individuals from themselves and each other by rendering them as objects, with more duties, but less freedom. I agree that Longus accepts some violence and oppression as the necessary if often saddening sacrifice one pays for becoming an adult member of society (Chalk 1960, 46; Turner 1960, 122). The novel’s unsettling details evidence an awareness, and even protest, against this necessity.

Compare the beginning of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Daphnis and Chloe (Morgan 2001). Both present imperfect narrators offering tales of transformation, education, and even salvation, with Apuleius’ product more problematical, and both narrators show a sort of double perspective on events.³ Much current opinion maintains that the prologue’s “I” is not the Lucius of the main story, an unreliable narrator prone to various forms of idealization (see essays in Kahane and Laird 2001). In Longus’ prologue, the implied “I’ is likewise an authorly construct (Morgan 2003, 171–189; Winkler 1990b, 106–107): a narrator of a story whose full significances and depths elude him. For example, the narrator does not perceive the connection between the painting he sees and the dedication Daphnis and Chloe set up, does not notice how serious the sex-play Daphnis and Chloe engage in is, is strangely silent about Philetas’ paean to Eros, and fails to appreciate Lycainion’s real role (Morgan 2003, 182–189). Indeed, because Daphnis and Chloe is ostensibly the work of a narrator inspired by an exegete’s tale of the history behind a painting, readers should suspect that, like the narrator, they will need to work out a fuller interpretation. Both Longus and Apuleius offer blendings of realism and fantasy, and raise questions concerning their status as works of fiction, and the significance of fiction itself (Morgan 1994, 73ff ).

The hermeneutic games begin in the preface (Hunter 1983, 38–51; Kestner 1973; Pandiri 1985): “In Lesbos, while hunting, in a grove of the Nymphs I saw the most beautiful thing, a painted picture, a history of Love.” The first line denotes an evocative location, Lesbos, and a significant activity, hunting, which can denote “aggressive seeking.” Clearly, the frame-narrator, a lover of beauty and a sophist, is seeking more than a game. He recalls those young men of myth who, while hunting, come upon a deity, often a nymph, and are transformed, usually tragically. A conversion/salvation experience occurs: the narrator has unexpectedly come upon a sacralized locus amoenus, and the reference to the beauty of the sight of the painting, which presents various episodes that, at least in the narrator’s opinion, are “all pertaining to love” and echo the Phaedrus and the recognition of the form of the beautiful (Hunter 1997, 23–27; Pandiri 1985, 118). The painting, the sight of beauty, and the story recalled to him the inevitable powers of love that he had forgotten (Alvares 2006, 19). Note how Longus arranges scenes rather like painted set pieces, giving a pictorial quality (Mittelstadt 1967, 752–761). Here arise questions of representation: painting or literature and reality or imitation; the narrator’s reaction to the painting itself recalls Lucian’s point in De Domo that a properly educated gentleman should not be stupefied by a beautiful sight, but should produce a composition equal (or even superior) to the original (Hunter 1983, 40–45; Zeitlin 1990, 432–434). The painting resides in a sacred area, a pilgrimage site, provided with an exegete who supplies the sacred tale (Zeitlin 1990, 422). The experience fills him with a longing (pothos) to compose something in response. Daphnis and Chloe is a votive dedication (anathema) to Eros’ power. This production of carefully crafted sophistry combines the pleasant (in its sweetness), harmony, and even musicality (Chalk 1960, 37; Hunter 1983, 84–98; Zeitlin 1990, 453) with what is educational and therefore useful (on this reference to Thucydides, see Hunter 1983, 47–50; Luginbill 2002, 233–247; Pandiri 1985, 117–119; Valley 1926, 102). His prayer to retain his sophrosyne could be a plea to keep his thoughts chaste while dealing with material potentially pornographic (Goldhill 1995, 13–14; Rhode 1914, 549; Wolfe 1912, 130). Or, recalling the Phaedrus’ Socrates, it can be a prayer to avoid a kind of inspired nympholepsy (Hunter 1997, 26–27). For Eros is Desire, which can bring up the sublime and feelings hardly accommodated by the socio-symbolic system by which we and our desires are constructed (Evans 1996, 201–203; Homer 2005, 33–45; Zizek 1991).

Longus creates and maintains an extensive pastoral world. Pastoral recalls Middle-Eastern myths of shepherds such as Dumuzi and primal paradises such as Eden. As Halperin (1983) and Berg (1965) show, Theocritus’ Daphnis bears the “religious aura” of the Middle-Eastern shepherd god, passive and loveable, who is connected to the landscape, but dies tragically, and is universally mourned. Longus’ recollection of the Theocritean Daphnis challenges standards of myth and pastoral, for his Daphnis will be both an iconic representative of a world, yet non-tragic. Yet, note how the Daphnis of Idyll I differs from Daphnis the happy victor over Menalcas in Idyll 9, or the seducer of Idyll 27 (Hunter 1983, 22–31). Further, a long tradition contrasted rural simplicity with urban decadence, and the comparison between city and country formed part of the rhetorical tradition. This contrast can also be observed in Dio of Prusa’s Hunters of Euboea, one of the many works of an era that showed an increased interest in country life (Effe 1999, 196–200). These works express the sense that urbanites have been cut off from the natural world, its gods, and its harmonies, corrupted by the artificialities of human culture, and their longing for some return. However, in Daphnis and Chloe, the city–country opposition is lessened by details that undercut claims that his rustics are significantly morally superior (Saïd 1999, 98–104). Longus’ conceit, noted earlier, is that these superlative children will develop in the countryside a better form of amatory and social behavior that is useful for both city and country.

New Comedy, another quasi-utopian genre, is an equally important influence (Heiserman 1977, 130–145; Hunter 1983, 67–70; Pandiri 1985, 139; Zeitlin 1990, 427–428), introducing plot elements foreign to pastoral and disturbing the rustic cosmos (Reardon 1994, 135–147; also Pandiri 1985, 116 and n. 3). The transition from pastoral to New Comedy represents movement from the relatively protected pastoral locus amoenus to an engagement with urban reality and ideology. The couple’s erotic maturation is paralleled by their social maturation, also coordinated with increasing invasions of the countryside by city-folk; first the Tyrian pirates, then the Methymnian youths, followed by the Methymnian invasion, then Lycainion, and finally Dionysiophanes’ party. The telos of New Comedy, and thus of Longus’ novel, conforms to Frye’s meta-genre of comedy (1957, 163–171), which concerns the formation of a new, more ideal society that marriage symbolizes, which is only achieved after obstacles are overcome, knowledge and identity gained, and, often, prior wrongs righted.

Longus’ depictions of the “natural” are conventions, often overused, from pastoral, elegy, and so forth. Thus, not even knowing the name of love, Daphnis and Chloe spontaneously reproduce behaviors (pelting each other with apples, indulging in soliloquies, exchanging oaths, etc.) familiar from the romantic and erotic genres, as if the literary was somehow also the natural. Such an interplay between the natural and art, raising complex questions about representation and mimesis (Zeitlin 1990, 430–444), was a characteristic of pastoral as well as New Comedy. Pastoral itself is the sophisticate’s reflection upon his world, which is always in the background as antithesis. It is an apparent retreat into a simpler life informed with the beautiful, harmonious, and aesthetically agreeable, with the romantic–sentimental dream that these beauties could be natural, the world more human. The aesthetic art has brought out a preexisting beauty compatible with human sensibilities (Alpers 1996, 1–43). It is also a space (often quasi-divine) with leisure (and divine protection) enough for humans to enjoy. Pastoral, framing the everyday in art, brings out the mythical in the ordinary and even humble (Segal 1981, 4). Through an art that constantly, densely, and self-consciously imitates art as well as nature,⁴ Longus’ world gains the aura of the natural, not natural as a mimesis of nature-as-it-is, but rather natural as a distillation of the processes of human art, a sort of “effect of the real.” As noted earlier, there is a lightness of touch, a certain ironic and ludic spirit, in which art plays amid memories of innocence lost, although a “smutty” reading remains possible. At its best, the pastoral art “has the regenerative power to recapture a lost sympathy between man and nature, a lost harmony between intellect and feeling, a paradisiacal garden where the tree of life stands and love and innocence can coexist” (Segal 1981, 12; also Frye 1957, 99–101, 152–153). Thus, when the frame-narrator mimics stylized pastoral conventions, he partially embeds his own world within the pastoral mood-vision and its significances.

Longus has given Daphnis and Chloe the aura of myth, and archetypal patterns are accordingly important for interpretation. Not only does the name “Daphnis” have various associations with demigods, but Chloe was a title of Demeter (Hunter 1983, 17). Longus has blended the idealizing meta-genres of romance, with its depiction of the hero’s life and quest, and comedy, with its emphasis on the breaking of falsehood and improper rules and the creation of a new society (Frye 1957, 186–195, 316–324 on romance; 43–48, 163–171 on comedy). The story of Daphnis and Chloe conforms to the hero paradigm (Rank 1959, 14–64; also Frye 1957, 186–206 and 1976, 65–93), which gives the plot its overall structure: a child of high rank, through some prior crime, loses his birthright, is raised in a pastoral setting, and then, after various complications (including occasional heroic action, the performance of a quest, and divine favor), regains his status, often bringing renewal to his people. The comic recognition/triumph plot is a displaced version of this hero paradigm. Pastoral’s static quality is faulted as providing no vision of action applicable to the reader’s world (Alpers 1996, 33–34, who cites Schiller 1985, 211). However, the mythic paradigm of the hero’s maturation and triumph, coupled with the seasonal progression, gives a forward motion that leads naturally to the New Comic plot moments of Book 3 and, especially, Book 4. The fact that this tale uses such archetypal actors, actions, and setting gives it a sense of being a sort of founding myth (Heiserman 1977, 143; Zeitlin 1990, 422), which also fits their status as marvelous children destined to be transformative agents. Indeed, the depiction of the couple’s story, and the focus of a pilgrimage site, inspires the frame-narrator and closes the temporal circle and points to the possibility of creative repetition (Frye 1976, 177) that its lessons for love and society could inspire future reform.

The narrative’s saturation with religious/philosophic elements (including the language and imagery of a mystery religion) and divine activity offer structural and thematic elements common to the myths and rituals of mystery cults (Frye 1976, 13; also Reardon 1994, 139). However, there is no need to believe that more formal mystic rites are referred to here (see Beck 2003; Chalk 1960; Hunter 1983, 31–38; Kerénui 1927; Merkelbach 1962, 1988). Nevertheless, humans do long for beneficent gods, and divine helpers assist mythical heroes. Accordingly, Daphnis and Chloe’s gods, most of whom are connected with nature, actively work for the couple’s protection and are aligned with their maturation. The couple’s initial protectors are the nymphs, simple nature spirits, who may also be transfigured nymphs who were victims of Pan—Pitys, Syrinx, and Echo (Morgan 2003, 185). When Daphnis and Chloe finally fall in love, they eventually become acquainted with Eros. As Daphnis matures and male aggression becomes problematic, Pan emerges as a major character whom Daphnis recalls in various details.

The novel presents multiple erotes: Philetas’ speech and various passages intentionally recall the cosmogonic Eros of Orphic/Dionysian mysteries and Plato. There appears the winged rascal of Philetas’ garden, the arrogant boy who orders the adoptive parents of Daphnis and Chloe to send them out into the world, with whom later the Nymphs plead to allow the marriage, and, finally, the Eros constructing Chloe’s muthos. Opposed to the cosmic Eros is the all-too-human, day-to-day Eros, the rascal and dangerous tyrant, the Eros of our mortal desires, compulsions, fears—different erotes for different levels of Longus’ text and different readers.

Dionysus, he of many names and quite central for Daphnis and Chloe (Chalk 1960, 34, and n. 18; Hunter 1983, 37–38), is associated with harvest, vegetation, the seasonal cycle, and wine, through whom the rural abundance is received and enjoyed. The countryside’s worship of Dionysus was vigorous, even in Roman times, and he was viewed as one of country folk’s gods. Dionysus transcends and unites varied worlds, natural and social. Under the freedom of music, wine, and dance, distinctions lessen between the old and young. The rural Dionysia brings the rustics together in joyous community, and the private winter Dionysia (3.10) gathers Chloe’s family together along with Daphnis as they look forward to spring. Dionysus is also well integrated into the life of urbanites (Nilsson 1957) and brings the city-dwellers into a greater, although artificial, connection with the countryside. His myths make him an outsider, even persecuted, and often a foe of established practice and decorum, yet also a world conqueror. Dionysus’ links with mystery religion, with the power of life, death, ecstasy, and transformation, are well known. In tragedy and comedy, performed for Dionysus, life’s sufferings and contradictions are made palatable or at least sensible. Eros’ muthos of Chloe, displayed through the drama of Daphnis and Chloe (particularly the fourth book), performs exactly the Dionysic function of drama in order to create an imagined solution to contradictions, both individual and social. This is not an unproblematic activity, for the aesthetic can make the unacceptable seem natural, even beautiful.

The ornamental garden of Book 4, where nature and art imitate each other, illustrates Dionysus’ labor as the presiding god of human activity that harmonizes the diverse and contradictory. As Morgan (2004, 224) notes, the garden is “organized on an urban aesthetic system,” with “deliberately staged views over land and sea, reducing the natural landscape and the life and the life of those who work in it to the status of aesthetic object.” It is an item to be viewed and contemplated (Zeitlin 1990, 444–446). The central altar stresses Dionysus’ centrality, depicting his career, from birth through struggle to triumph. This violence, so different from the delightful harmony of Philetas’ garden, points to the brutal and tragic aspects of life that the Dionysic drama makes comprehensible. This garden seems a “silent, sterile” place, where the birds do not chirp as in Philetas’ bower. However, note how Pan, who is closely associated with Dionysus, is there, playing silent music, that is, the music of the imagination, where aesthetic objects are made. Accordingly, Dionysiophanes is “Dionysus manifest” not in the sense that his morality makes him particularly godlike; we later learn now Dionysiophanes exposed Daphnis, expecting him to die, only for reasons of relative poverty. He (as well as Daphnis, well connected to Dionysus)⁵ is a manifestation of Dionysus and one of the productions of the Dionysic art.

This drama’s central concern, how Daphnis and Chloe gradually learn about love, its cure and contexts, knowledge, and experience, functions structurally as the quest object. This knowledge and experience comes through instinct, imitation, and education, which are three forms of learning whose operations Longus’ text explores with subtlety. As children, they begin as simple imitators of a compliant nature (Deligiorgis 1974, 3; Epstein, 2002, 31; Morgan 1994, 70), but simple imitation is not enough. In time, after they have fallen in love, they become acquainted with what human nature needs to bring to its potential and which is necessary for a truly human life. Then, questions of what to imitate and how to be educated become critical, and also whether nature, however essential, suffers some loss as it is processed by human culture.

The beginning of Eros’ serious machinations (1.12) figures their initial problem and its coming (partial) resolution. Daphnis, racing after a goat defeated in a sexual battle, falls into a covered pit, along with a goat that breaks his fall. This scene signifies Daphnis’ coming descent into the problematics of male aggressive “goatish” sexuality (Epstein 2002, 25–26). He is rescued by Chloe and Dorcon, using Chloe’s unusually long breast band. This event symbolizes his eventual rescue by Chloe, that feminine drawing him upward in part through her erotic attraction. Dorcon, who supplies the muscle, whose lust for Chloe is now fired, and who, thwarted, will later try to rape Chloe, initially tries to win Chloe through a contest common to pastoral, and his wonderful skill at pipes signifies a special status. Philetas’ pronouncement that there is no cure for love but sex shows the limitations of the pastoral perspective, and can be connected to Dorcon’s violent measures. Thus, in the end, Dorcon will die and be honored as a pastoral hero (Pandiri 1985, 122; Morgan 2004, 173–175), and his family will appear at Chloe’s wedding.

Unlike the conventions of other romances, neither Daphnis nor Chloe fall in love at first sight, but first form a community between themselves, their animals (Epstein 2002, 28–29), and the natural setting before sexual concerns arise. Longus remarks “You would have seen the sheep and goats parted from each other sooner than Daphnis and Chloe” (1.10.3); accordingly, they are χαίροντες ὡς ἀρχήν μεγάλήν παρελάμβανον έφίλουν τὰς αγας κὰί τά προβάτα μὰλλον ἢ ἐπιμέσιν ἔθος (1.8). Thus, their love develops from a productive foundation of good nature, friendship, and community, which creates a basis for mutual compassion. Once they do fall in love—she by seeing him naked, he through her kiss—the question arises, “How can Daphnis manage to love Chloe without violating her subjectivity and identity, losses suffered by the women in the three inserted myths, and retain some of that innocent community with her?” The Chloe of Eros’ muthos will avoid the fates of Phatta, Syrinx, and Echo—but to what extent? Each of these three myths, pertaining to Daphnis and Chloe’s development, also present an aition; the muthos of Chloe will be the aition for the shrine and for Daphnis and Chloe, all congruent to the narrator’s claim to express profound truth through muthos (Deligiorgis 1974; Kestner 1973; Philippides 1980; on Chloe as the fourth myth, see MacQueen 1985).

While the Phatta myth may manifest Chloe’s anxiety about not being as musical as Daphnis or having his status (Hunter 1997, 19), note that the story is narrated immediately after a scene of Daphnis’ consumptive gazing (1.25), wherein he acknowledges her power over him, a power which might be unconsciously (and dangerously) resented. Daphnis indeed begins the story comparing Chloe to Phatta: “There was a maid once upon a time, maid.” The myth, although non-sexual (although Phatta sings of Pitys, a victim of Pan who loses identity), asserts male strength—the hero wins by sheer volume, and a loss of female identity but not musicality follows.

By 2.12.3, their sexual experimentation has so advanced that they might have done the real thing had troubles not shaken the countryside. In the following delaying action, two plot staples of romance appear—trial and war⁶—which (particularly the war) introduce elements more alien to pastoral. The couple’s subsequent leap into knowledge of the wider world’s realities corresponds to a markedly more critical period of their amatory lives, where matters of law and violence will factor more. Thus, the linking of the experience of Pan and warfare—Pan-like erotic violence can endanger lovers like military violence can ruin cities. However, Pan-potential can be used for the good; note Pan’s rescue of Chloe, recalling his intervention at Marathon.

The Syrinx myth, told during the celebration of Chloe’s rescue, turns to even more issues of identity and male aggression. The musical, goat(!)-herding Syrinx rejects Pan as being neither human nor goat, his hybridity symbolic of Daphnis’ problematical identity. Threatened with rape, Syrinx disappears into the marsh to become the reeds, which Pan angrily cuts up to form his pipes. It is important to note that these pipes, so associated with Pan’s music, originate in violence and a loss of female identity. Music plays a very important role: the gods are musical, the order and harmony of music are incorporated into the human and natural world, music even offers an alternative form of technology for managing nature, as Daphnis, Philetas, and Dorcon demonstrate (Maritz 1991, 55–67). Music (and thus its power) is associated with women, and these myths thematize male attempts to control original female power, which, however violated, cannot be completely extinguished, and is instead transformed into something superior and beneficent (Morgan 2003, 69–70), as Chloe will be. That Daphnis and Chloe mime this myth, in a Dionysic context no less (2.36.1–2), signifies its relevance for them. Daphnis’ version omits the violence—he plays a tune of wooing, then of seeking and not finding. There is no explicit rape attempt. Winkler (1990b) thought that Daphnis and Chloe simply erased the rape through the aesthetic distancing of dance; accordingly, Philetas hands his pipes, which resemble those primal pipes, over to Daphnis, indicating Daphnis is his successor and has mastered the masculine and violent erotic protocols. An alternative view is that of Daphnis as a master piper crafting a better performance concerning love; and this better tune is followed, at least partially, by better practice (Epstein 2002, 34). Further, note that afterward, swearing mutual oaths, Chloe rejects Daphnis’ invocation of Pan, citing the god’s violence and unfaithfulness. Aesthetics have not blinded her to Pan’s reputation. Chloe’s mistrust gives her an opportunity to express subjectivities that Daphnis in turn can acknowledge (a trust-building activity) as she makes him swear by those beings with whom he has a sacred community and calling, his animals (Morgan, 2003, 188) and the goat that nursed him. Later, they will build an altar to Eros the Shepherd.

As the couple progress though the seasons, the sexual differentiation between them increases, as does the brutality of the myths and the possibility of an irreconcilable discord between them. The violent Echo myth is narrated after Daphnis’ sexual “lesson” from Lycainion, which ends in a warning concerning the bloodiness that comes with the female’s loss of virginity, coupled with her reminder that she made him a man, evidencing female power. Here, when Daphnis has gained important knowledge and faces a choice for or against violence to Chloe for his own satisfaction, the fear arises of a deep incompatibility between the sexes, which is figured in the refusal of all males by Echo, Pan’s violent reaction, and how Earth hides Echo’s remains across the landscape. Earth is a primal female power, a counterforce to male gods, suggesting a possible and profound incompatibility between male and female. Echo as a universal imitator recalls woman’s lack of stable meaning within the male-created symbolic system, where, as a result, woman has only those qualities that are projected upon her (Evans 1996, 219–221; Homer 2005, 102; Janan 1994, 28–29). Pan’s frustration and desire to know his invisible pupil thematizes the male inability to really know a woman when the male cannot think past woman as echo/pupil of himself, a stance that Plutarch, for example, recommends in his Advice to the Bride and Groom (Goessler 1999, 97–115; Swain 1999, 85–96). Initially, Daphnis himself, possessed of superior sexual knowledge, adopted the attitude of teacher toward Chloe (Hunter 1997, 19). Pan’s frustrating inability to know his invisible pupil mirrors Daphnis’ limitations in knowing Chloe when she is his pupil, his echo. Note how, after this parable, Chloe kisses Daphnis repeatedly “for the Echo/echo said mostly the same things, as if witnessing that he [Daphnis] falsified nothing.” In telling the myth of Echo in this particular way, Daphnis also acknowledges Chloe’s power and potential, one which goes beyond her role as Daphnis’ pupil.

It is evident that the process by which Daphnis and Chloe, who initially do not even know the name of love, learn what love is and that they are in love, illustrates that “love” is a term given to an experience, and a social form of managing that experience. The protagonists’ learning the logos of love through the impulse of desire purposefully recalls Plato, especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium (Hunter 1997, 5–28; also Bretzigheimer 1988, 524–529). Yet, there are ironies: the countryside is exactly where Socrates cannot do philosophy, nor, despite Philetas’ discourse and visions of cosmogonic marvels, do Daphnis and Chloe make true philosophic progress. Likewise, Gnathon produces a wonderful if canned philosophical justification for his infatuation for Daphnis, casting doubt on all philosophic logoi, although in fact he speaks truer than he knows, having become a theates of Daphnis’ beauty (MacQueen 1990, 170). Logos can be equated with the Word of the Father, who controls and restrains desire, often through the mechanism of the law, official and unofficial. Nevertheless, there can be a significant gap between our true subjective experience and the constructions of custom (Irigaray 1996). When Chloe and then Daphnis “fall in love,” as their exasperated soliloquies show, their subjective experience cannot be squared with what they know or understand.

Philetas, who purposefully recalls the arch-pastoral poet Philetas as well as Lycidas of Theocritus’ Idyll 7 (Bowie 1985, 678–691), appears to assist them at this developmental impasse. He, a retired herdsman, now cultivates his elaborate garden, which symbolizes experience rendered into aesthetically pleasing objects. Philetas tells a fable-like narrative designed to make the couple understand that they are experiencing “being in love” and what to do about it. Here, the couple’s conception of their experience of desire and desire’s nature has been constructed for them though the processes of the symbolic order proclaimed by a father figure.⁷ In addition, Philetas’ pronouncement partially works; the couple admits to each other that they are “in love.”

Yet, nevertheless, the couple wonders whether Eros is a bird or a boy, if the story is muthos or logos (2.7.1). Philetas’ philosophic/cosmogonic description of Eros is rather at odds with his earthy advice, which in turn contradicts both Theocritean pastoral (Morgan 2004, 183) and Plato, where the properly philosophic couple does not physically consummate their love. Further, Philetas declares the couple must give in to desire and yet fails to clearly spell out exactly what this entails, a silence congruent with the shortcomings of Theocritean-style pastoral, which dwells on the moment of desire, not on satisfaction, much less marriage and family (Zeitlin 1990, 426, n. 29, who cites Pongioli 1975, 55–56; Ettin 1984, 149). The subjectivities of the individuals involved are not particularly important either, and Daphnis and Chloe thus see love in terms of a serious sickness, with no idea of its more positive potential. I have mentioned earlier how the notion that the only cure for desire is sex can present a justification for male violence. This confusion and the lack of success of Philetas’ “remedy” also points to its insufficient, even alienating nature.

Further education, which will lead them to discern a more positive side to love, is left to Lycainion, to Daphnis and Chloe’s adoptive parents, and to Dionysiophanes. Both Lycainion and especially Gnathon, that symposiastic philosopher and would-be seducer, stand in contrast to Philetas. Lycainion’s predatory name, “Miss Little Wolf,” recalls Dorcon’s attempt to rape Chloe, and the real wolf whose activities indirectly got the erotic plot started (Morgan 2004, 208–210; also Levin 1977). An experienced city woman, she, cleverly using myth as pretence, gives Daphnis his lesson (for him a mystery revelation) in sexual technique (3.16–20) after observing Daphnis and Chloe’s failed erotic attempts to imitate their animals. When Daphnis is about to rush off and sexually educate Chloe, having no idea that premarital sex might be wrong, Lycainion offers Daphnis the choice of gaining pleasure through violence to Chloe, a pleasure Daphnis refuses, even later avoiding seeing Chloe naked (3.24). In my reading, this moment of moral choice is the crucial and deciding development for Daphnis.

However, maturation also involves knowing one’s social and political identity and the conventions/problematics of society, part of the work’s political unconscious (Jameson 1981). In Daphnis and Chloe, the couple cannot finalize their sexual identity until their true social status is revealed, or rather, constructed. The increasing invasions from without reveal the couple’s status as subjects of various codes: plunder for the Tyrian pirates and the Methymnian army, part of the patrimony for Chloe’s father, a subject of law at trial, an economic resource for the city,⁸ and a slave who can be tortured or given away as an item of pleasure, and finally, as the son and daughter of the highest aristocrats of Mytilene. In the realm of the symbolic, where individuals are rendered as objects, social relationships are defined, such as “father” or “husband,” and “slave,” as well those exchanges involving status or money. Dionysiophanes defines who Daphnis exactly is, weaving a verifying narrative of identity that also engages (so to redeem) an old family scandal. Megacles, Chloe’s true father, produces a similar type of narrative. As Daphnis and Chloe gain a more complex identity, they experience the oppressions the law enables; note the fear they have, for example, at meeting Daphnis’ master (4.6). Later, Daphnis hesitates to reveal his love for Chloe to Dionysiophanes; it is Chloe’s father who insists on revealing the truth, which leads to her recognition. Daphnis is even prepared for Dionysiophanes’ questions about Chloe’s virginity (4.31). Clearly, Daphnis has learned all too well and quickly how love defers to matters of birth, status, and convention. Yet, while the recognized Daphnis is sorting out his new narrative of identity, he temporarily ignores Chloe (4.27), which leads to her near loss, and, paradoxically, to Gnathon’s redemption. Luckily, this loss, another test, demonstrates to Daphnis how his own identity is bound to a life with Chloe.

Daphnis’ increasingly asymmetric role becomes more acceptable because of his evident concern for Chloe’s subjectivities. Public justification for his private enjoyment is ultimately provided by the wedding’s socio-symbolic context, making the act a necessary operation within a system where all are rendered as objects and all have obligations. However, now Daphnis and Chloe are no longer the carefree near-children who simply and spontaneously imitate nature, who work out among themselves their relationship without the secrets. When Daphnis’ and Chloe’s attempt to imitate animal sex fails, the lesson is not just that they need human culture to teach them; they might well have figured it out themselves (2.11.3). Likewise, during sex, physis also instructs Daphnis what to do (3.18). What Philetas, Lycainion, Gnathon, and Daphnis’ and Chloe’s real and adoptive parents teach them is sex according to the city and its protocols. What has been sacrificed to a considerable extent is their freedom, their subjectivity, and even personal authenticity. The life of Dionysus illustrates the unavoidability of violence and personal sacrifice; the theater of Dionysus makes these oppressions palatable though drama’s aesthetic logos. I am sympathetic to Winkler’s opinion (1990) that the rustics’ rude sounds outside the wedding chamber recall that breaking of innocence, of freedom, and the violation of subjectivity, however happy the couple in fact are. And we need not doubt that happiness, which is also the sign of hope.

The paradigmatic hero, when recognized, brings benefit to his people, often restoring an old community or creating a new one, sometimes founding some beneficial rite or practice. Daphnis and Chloe do both. Weddings are a frequent eschatological symbol for the creation of a new society; likewise, New Comedies often end in marriage. During their nuptials, held at the cave of the nymphs where Chloe was discovered, there is a utopian blending where gods, city folk, country folk, and even animals play a part. The presence of Lycainion and Chromis suggests that Lycainion, observing how Daphnis’ loyalty and love for Chloe does not depend upon sex, has learned a lesson and that her relationship with Chromis has thus been renewed (Morgan 2004, 210, 247). Lampis too attends, and even plays music, though he earlier had ruined the ornamental garden in an act of symbolic sexual violence in order to wreck Daphnis’ potential marriage; and the family of Dorcon, who attempted to rape Chloe, attend, all rehabilitated through their contact with the protagonists. Afterwards, Daphnis and Chloe will live a mostly pastoral life, and fruit and milk will be their favorite foods, not fancy urban fare. Unlike Dionysiophanes, absent from his properties for 16 years, they will be proper models of aristocrats who will live among the people they own, and maintain the connection with the countryside, its gods, and values. Ensuring that their children are also suckled by animals and making the shrine that becomes the pilgrimage site represent the utopian prospect of carrying forward what has been learned and experienced into the future. The concluding phrase, “and then Chloe learned what had happened near the wood had been the playthings of shepherds,” can refer both to Chloe and to the reader who must now depart the ludic, controlled space of a pastoral fairy tale (recall how horror, humor, and beauty haunt real fairy tales), and return to the “real” world. The question is to what sort of world, and how changed the traveler is. On that wedding night, Daphnis reportedly only did some of the things Lycainion taught him. Since their encounter was so short, what could these implied other things possibly be? I suggest that Lycainion should be seen as having unlocked Daphnis’ sexual imagination, teaching him the erotic potentials between a man and a woman, only some of those potentials which he explored that night.

One can read Daphnis and Chloe as hidden mystery, sophistic gamesmanship, sentimental froth, and even pornography. The choice involves readerly attitudes; one is implied in Frye’s notion of “the poem of expanded consciousness” (1957, 301; 1976, 125–126), in which the mundane, the comic, and even the horrible are illuminated by the glow of a dream which transcends their brute realities. Perhaps the finest achievement of pastoral is in the wantonly playful way it rehearses the old ideal themes, not because its readers are uncaring, unserious, or have not learned history’s lessons, but because, without the spirit of play, the gravity of memory would crush us all. Daphnis and Chloe, for those who can listen, can, like the better pastoral, (re)awaken desire for that idyllic dream, even within the lengthening shadows of the world of experience and amid the silvered strands of scholarship.

Notes

1 The theoretical approaches of Lacan have been used successfully by scholars of Roman love elegy, which deals with many issues found in the erotic novel, particularly Janan and Miller, and this approach can produce interesting readings; see Alvares (2011). For understanding and applying Lacanian theory, I have used Janan 1994, Homer 2005, Lee 1990, and Zizek and Ross 2003, who in turn relies upon Bowie 1991, Evans 1996, and Fink 1995. For more on the “Word of the Father,” see Homer 2005, 57–59; Janan 1994, 23–24; Evans 1996, 119.

2 That Philetas’ son has the pastoral name “Tityrus” and resembles both goats and Eros (see Morgan 2004, 195) suggests that Philetas’ tradition too will continue.

3 As the observant ass, Lucius views many harsh details of Roman life, but then reveals the perspectives of the aristocrat’s mind; see Hall 1995. Longus’ frame narrator does likewise.

4 Almost every single passage refers to the works of various authors including Theocritus, Sappho, Philetas, Plato, Thucydides, Homer, and many more; see Valley 1926, 79–104; Hunter 1983, 59–83. Zeitlin 1990, 438, calls the text “almost entirely mimetic.”

5 Daphnis, the son of Dionysiophanes (= “Dionysos manifest”), is suckled by a goat as Zeus was, declares he is beardless like Dionysus (1.16.4), finds a stream which waters Dionysus’ formal garden, and dedicates his bag and skin to Dionysus (4.26.10). He and Chloe are compared to Dionysus and a Maenad (1.16.4; 2.2.2). Pan’s intervention against the Methymnian fleet recalls the god’s operations in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. Further, in Vergil’s fifth Eclogue, Daphnis is seen as founder of a Bacchic cult, and he may have been connected with Dionysic worship. Gnathon is a follower of Dionysus, and many events associated with the final recognition happen in or near his ornamental garden; see Morgan 2004, 8.

6 The theft of mooring rope, the war’s cause, provides an absurd touch. Scholars wonder about the connection between this war, recalling Thucydides’ account of Athenian actions on Lesbos, and the prologue’s Thucydidean claims about being useful. Clearly, Mytiliene is idealized, able to figure what actions serve self-interest, unlike Athens and avoiding war; see Trzaskoma 2005, 75–90, and Cueva 2004, 54–61.

7 Another individual who also “lays down the law” regarding desire is Gnathon in his speech to Astylus, a logos crafted through knowledge gained at the symposia of the debauched (4.17).

8 Note especially 3.21.2, where fishermen are oaring hard to get fresh fish to a rich man. On Greek novels reflecting the perspective of the consumer city that utilizes the countryside, see Saïd 1999, 92 and n. 90–91.

References

Alpers, P. 1996. What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alvares, J. 2006. “Reading Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon in counterpoint.” In Authors, Authority and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel: Essaus in Honor of Gareth L. Schmeling, edited by Shannon N. Byrne, Edmund P. Cueva, and Jean Alvares. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 5. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing: Groningen University Library, pp. 1–33.

Alvares, J. 2011. “Considering desire in the Greek romances employing Lacanian theory: Some explorations.” (Forthcoming in publication of ICAN IV.) Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing.

Anderson, G. 1982. Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play. Chico, California: Scholars Press.

Anderson, G. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. New York and London: Routledge.

Beck, R. 2003. “Mystery religions, aretalogy and the ancient novel.” In The Novel in the Ancient World (rev. ed.), edited by Gareth L. Schmeling. Leiden: Brill, pp. 131–150.

Berg, W. 1965. “Daphnis and Prometheus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 96: 11–23.

Bowie, E.L. 1985. “Theocritus’ seventh Idyll, Philetas and Longus.” Classical Quarterly, 35: 67–91.

Bowie, M. 1991. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bretzigheimer, G. 1988. “Die Komik in Longos’ Hirtensroman Daphnis und Chloe.” Gymnasium, 95: 515–555.

Chalk, H. 1960. “Eros and the Lesbian pastorals of Longus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 80: 32–51.

Chew, K. 2000. “Achilles Tatius and parody.” Classical Journal, 96: 57–70.

Cueva, E.P. 2004. The Myths of Fiction. Studies in the Canonical Greek Novels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Deligiorgis, S. 1974. “Longus’ art in brief lives.” Philological Quarterly, 53: 1–9.

Effe, B. 1999. “Longus, towards a history of the Bucolic and its function in the Roman Empire.” In Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by Simon Swain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 189–209.

Epstein, S.J. 2002. “The education of Daphnis: Goats, gods, the birds and the bees.” Phoenix, 56: 25–39.

Ettin, A.V. 1984. Literature and Pastoral. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Evans, D. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge.

Fink, B. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Frye, N. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Frye, N. 1976. Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Goessler, L. 1999. “Advice to the bride and groom.” In Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolaton to His Wife. English Translation, Commentary, Interpretive Essaus and Bibliography, edited by Sarah Pomeroy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 97–115.

Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity. Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, E. 1995. “The ass with double vision: Politicising an ancient Greek Novel.” In Heart of a Heartless World: Essays in Cultural Resistance in Honour of Margot Heinemann, edited by David Margolies and Maroula Joannou. London: Pluto Press, pp. 47–59.

Halperin, D.M. 1983. “The forebears of Daphnis.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 113: 183–200.

Heiserman, A. 1977. Novel before the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Homer, S. 2005. Jacques Lacan. New York and London: Routledge.

Hunter, R. 1983. A Study in Daphnis and Chloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A fundamental exploration of the novel.

Hunter, R. 1997. “Longus and Plato.” In Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption, edited by Michelangelo Picone and Bernhard Zimmermann. Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 15–28.

Hunter, R. 2003. “Longus, Daphnis and Chloe.” In The Novel in the Ancient World (rev. ed.), edited by Gareth Schmeling. Leiden: Brill, pp. 361–386.

Irigaray, L. (Alison Martin, trans.). 1996. I Love to You. New York and London: Routledge.

Jameson, F. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Janan, M. 1994. When the Lamp is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus. Urbana: Southern Illinois University Press.

Kahane, A. and A. Laird, eds. 2001. A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kerénui, K. 1927. Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung. Tubingen: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Kestner, J. 1973–1974. “Ekphrasis as frame in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” Classical World, 67: 166–171.

Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Levin, D.N. 1977. “The pivotal role of Lycaenion in Longus’ pastorals.” Rivista storica dell’Antichità, 25: 5–17.

Luginbill, R.D. 2002. “A delightful possession: Longus’ prologue and Thucydides.” Classical Journal, 97.3: 233–247.

MacQueen, B.D. 1985. “Longus and the myth of Chloe.” Illinois Classical Studies, 10: 119–234.

MacQueen, B.D. 1990. Myth, Rhetoric, and Fiction: A Reading of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Maritz, J. 1991. “The role of music in Daphnis and Chloe.” Groningen Colloquia, IV: 55–67. Gronigen: Egbert Forsten.

Mason, H.J. 1979. “Longus and the topography of Lesbos.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 109: 149–163.

Mason, H.J. 1995. “Romance in a limestone landscape.” Classical Philology, 90: 263–266.

Merkelbach, R. 1962. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich and Berlin: C. H. Beck.

Merkelbach, R. 1988. Die Hirten des Dionysos: Die Dionysos-Mysterien der romischen Kaiserzeit und der bukolische. Roman des Longus. Stuttgart: Teubner.

Mittelstadt, M. 1967. “Longus: Daphnis and Chloe and Roman narrative painting.” Latomus, 26: 752–761.

Morgan, J.R. 1994. “Daphnis and Chloe: Love’s own sweet story.” In Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, edited by J.R. Morgan and R. Stoneman. London: Routledge, pp. 64–79.

Morgan, J.R. 2001. “The prologues of the Greek novels and Apuleius.” In A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, edited by Ahuvia Kahane and Andrew Laird. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 52–62.

Morgan, J.R. 2003. “Nymphs, neighbors and narrators: A narratological approach to Longus.” In The Ancient Novel and Beyond, edited by Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wyste Keulen. Leiden: Brill, pp. 171–190.

Morgan, J.R. 2004. Longus: Daphnis and Chloe. Oxford: Aris and Phillips. This combined text and commentary sums up much current scholarship.

Nilsson, M.P. 1957. The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age. Stockholm: Lund C. W. K. Gleerup.

Pandiri, T.A. 1985. “Daphnis and Chloe; the art of pastoral play.” Ramus, 14: 116–141.

Philippides, M. 1980. “The ‘Digressive’ aitia in Longus.” Classical World, 74: 193–199.

Pongioli, R. 1975. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rank, O. 1959. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings. New York: Vintage Books.

Reardon, B.P. 1994 “Mυ̑θος oὐ λόγος: Longus’s Lesbian pastorals.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by James Tatum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 135–147.

Rhode, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Saïd, S. 1999. “Rural society in the Greek novel, or the country as seen from the town.” In Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by Simon Swain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–107.

Schiller, F. 1985. “Naïve and sentimental poetry.” In German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, edited by N.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 177–233.

Segal, C. 1981. Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire. Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World A. D. 50–250. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Swain, S. 1999. “Plutarch’s moral program.” In Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife. English Translation, Commentary, Interpretive Essays and Bibliography, edited by Sarah Pomeroy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 85–96.

Turner, P. 1960. “Daphnis and Chloe: An interpretation.” Greece & Rome, n.s. 7: 117–123.

Valley, G. 1926. “Über den Sprachgebrauch des Longus.” Diss. University of Uppsala.

Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Gree k Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Inspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Greek Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Winkler, J.J. 1990a. The Constraints of Desire: the Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge.

Winkler, J.J. 1990b. “The education of Chloe: Hidden injuries of sex.” In The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece, edited by J. Winkler. New York: Routledge, pp. 101–126.

Winkler, J.J. 1991. “The education of Chloe: Erotic protocols and prior violence.” In Rape and Representation, edited by L.A. Higgins and B.R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 15–34.

Wolff, S.L. 1912. The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zeitlin, F. 1990. “The poetics of eros: Nature, art, and imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Sexuality in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 417–464.

Zizek, S. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 2

Daphnis and Chloe

Innocence and Experience, Archetypes and Art

Notes

References

Further Readings