The Greek novels were, to some extent, the modern myths of a new imperial age (for myth, ritual, and religion in the ancient novel, cf. Bierl 2007 and Zeitlin 2008). Both protagonists, male and female, are stars elevated to an ideal, perhaps most closely comparable to several film heroes of Hollywood—or better yet, of Bollywood. They are often compared to glamorous figures of myth, legendary young heroes and heroines, or even gods or their statues. They appear to others as gods, i.e. they are simply confused and equated with them on account of their radiant appearances. Through exempla or analogies, a flair for the sublime is conferred upon a simple, human love story (cf. Cueva 2004). On account of their outstanding beauty, the picture-perfect couple stands far beyond the normal human standard. As a direct result of this characterization, the episodes in which a third person falls in love with them at first sight become credible. At the same time, these heroic and divine figures tend to be characters that embody the girl or the boy on the threshold of adulthood or, as divinities, are responsible for the decisive rite de passage from youth to adulthood. To be named on the masculine side are, among others, Hippolytus, Achilles, Orestes, and Apollo, and on the feminine side Iphigenia, Andromeda, Philomela, Artemis, and Aphrodite, whereby the highlighted myths frequently reflect Walter Burkert’s concept of the Mädchentragödie (Burkert 1979, 6–7; 1996, 69–79; on the rite of passage see Gennep 1960).
The love novel circumscribes the fundamental crisis of this transition (Bierl 2007, especially 262–276), and, as is well known, both protagonists are in the bloom of youth. They are at the age of puberty, and their sudden experience of love accompanies the discovery of sexuality. At the same time, oneiric features frequently become crucial for the myth-like plot, for myths and dreams are closely associated with each other.1
Due to their fantastic, fairytale qualities, novels possess an astounding proximity to myth. Incredible elements, which accompany nightmarish aspects in a free, plasmatic fictionality, highlight fears during the central crisis before marriage. An ambiguous status on the boundary between truth and falsehood, mythos and logos, fiction and reality, fairytale and factuality comes into being. Gods and the mythical apparatus function frequently as a foil and as an erudite accessory for illustration that places the events of the novel in a mythic light but does not have to be identical to myth.
Evaluation of the mythic quality of the novel depends on the definition of the difficult terms “myth” and “ritual.” Against the standard tendency of ascribing universalizing or reductionist meanings, I emphasize, along with Margaret Alexiou, the performative element and fluctuation between polarities. Mythos frequently sets ritual in performance and accompanies these practices with stories. According to Alexiou (2002, 152–167), the meaning of myths lies in the gap between the binary oppositions of oral/written, primitive/civilized, superstitious/rational, true/false, rural/urban, and popular/literary, and is therefore continuously deferred.
In the following discussion, therefore, instead of the static, universalistic “what,” I wish to consider the “how” of its dynamic meaning, i.e. the function of myth in an eclectic methodology. Thus, it becomes a question of how mythic symbols and elements intrinsic to a narrative web function aesthetically and poetically, and in what way they promote definitive anthropological statements. Myths, which form “a traditional narrative with a secondary and partial reference to something of collective importance” (Burkert 1979, 23), possess a narrative and fictional potential that expresses itself linguistically in a chain of metaphors and metonymies.
Many ancient and post-antiquity Greek narratives and popular songs depict crises and states of fear in a highly pathetic and fantastic manner, through which they themselves could nearly adopt a ritual function. Specifically, the world of the young girl during puberty and the dramatic, liminal situation of marriage also represent an important theme. The woman, who in the novels renounces love and yet is confronted with sexuality nonetheless, is an ideal mediatrix between patriarchal demands, new religious forms and sexual daydreams, and power fantasies (see Alexiou 2002). The permanent oscillation of myth between polarities recalls the simultaneous deferral of love as “discourse of absence” (Barthes 1979, 13–17), which is constitutive for the love novel. As I have shown elsewhere, it is possible to associate the novel’s plot with a dream sequence on account of its imaginary quality (Bierl 2006, especially 82–93 on Xen. Eph.). Excessive erotic desire can be connected to Jacques Lacan’s theory of oscillating deferral of meaning, which assumes a schism and fundamentally deficient structure of the subject. Accordingly, the ego is constituted on the basis of chains of signifiers according to the linguistic turn based on Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, by way of the supplementarity of signs in the tropological play of metaphor and metonymy. The subject and, even more so, the lover, are located in a state of continuous gliding, a “glissement incessant du signifié sous le signifiant” (Lacan 1966, 260; cf. Bierl 2006, 85–86), to close the gaps to the “other” which open up. Therefore, the lovers are particularly subject to language, and in the reference play of signs, a meaning-generating narration is born. Jakobson associates the work of condensation and displacement that is typical of dreams with the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language that determine the textual fiction (Jakobson 1971, especially 243).
Despite the advent of writing, myth and the rituals that accompany myth did not die off but rather lived on in an altered form and fulfilled the same duties in the sophistic novel of negotiating, playing on, affirming, undermining, and transforming wild or threatening material for the purpose of coping with life, as myths had done as simple, oral narratives. Myths and novels are therefore closely interlaced with one another. Just as with rituals and dreams, both forms bring the same themes into focus: violence, horror, terror, wonder; contact with gods, heroes, and animals; nature, sexuality, and the foreign as well as the “other” in opposition to the “self.”
Therefore, mythos is not, as Kerényi (1927) believed, the origin or Urbild of this genre, from which the novel developed in the trend of a literary process of secularization to a verbürgerlichter (“conventionalized”) and humanized form.2 Suffering and eros scarcely have their actual placement in the Egyptian Isis and Osiris myth, but rather we have to make do with the conscious employment of mythos as an aesthetic method. Thus, artistic recourse to myth undoubtedly occurs not from a genetic relationship of dependence, but for the purpose of gaining depth of focus through this well-known communicative medium for an explosive, anthropological problem that concerns all people. Subsequently, the novel’s text is not a derivative of myth but rather stands in interdependence with it as a means of aesthetic and poetic expression.
Daphnis and Chloe is fundamentally distinguished from other novels, since Longus connects the genre to bucolic poetry of the Hellenistic era, especially to the Eidyllia of Theocritus.3 In doing so, Longus adopts a tension between oppositions that is typical for him and is indebted to the development of the bucolic genre. At the beginning, Theocritus casts an ironic picture of simple, country life from an urbane, educated perspective and of a mythical shepherd who gives expression to lovesickness in song. Idealizing, poetic conceptions of an escapist yearning for a simple existence in nature emerge some centuries later. Already, in direct succession to Theocritus from the poems of the corpus Theocriteum, followed by Moschus and Bion until Vergil, an increasing idealization and mythologization of pastoral life unfolds. In addition, a clear eroticization becomes visible which goes so far that, in the inauthentic poem [Theocr.] 27, the notoriously lovesick Daphnis finds a love affair of mutual fulfillment, anticipating the romantic scenario in the work of Longus (Bernsdorff 2006, especially 180–207; specifically on the subject of mythos, 186–188).
Thus, Longus embraces both old as well as newer bucolic poetry and integrates all threads of the imaginary, pastoral word into his highly artificial, literary work, even those of his time, and from this stems the ambiguity of Daphnis and Chloe that has been established over and over again (Reardon 1994). Seriousness is juxtaposed to irony, realism to idealism, techne to physis (Teske 1991), and country to city (Effe 1982). According to perspective, the novel’s evaluation in the research tradition fluctuates between an ironic, evil, and cynical power work of pornography and rhetoric,4 and an ideal work of art “edler Einfalt und stiller Größe” (“of noble innocence and silent magnitude,” Winckelmann) that lends expression to a devoted reverence for the cheerfully religious world of nature.5
Everything that the genre of the novel emphasized up to this point—adventure, violence, threatening of chastity and purity, striding in a wide space as an expression of erotic lack and gliding in the opening gap of painful desire as well as reaching out to a third party until the happy ending in marriage—remains present in the background, but is radically and ostensibly transformed on the surface. The pair acts on the small isle of Lesbos, and there in the rustic ambience of Mytilene, the ideal and poetic place of love where Sappho and Alcaeus wrote their poetry. Adventures take place only sporadically as incursions from outside by attacking bandits or due to entanglements with rich neighbors from Methymna who set out on hunting excursions.
The element of interminable desire, suffering in longing for the absent “other,” is deferred onto a story of the fulfillment of love in the sexual act that is delayed over many episodes. This act must be painstakingly learned in a process over one and a half years. Last of all come social complications that condition Daphnis’ and Chloe’s actual heritage as exposed children of rich parents from the city. Thus, the narrative serves to circumscribe the critical awakening of pubescent sexuality as well as to standardize and legitimize correct gender behavior. To be sure, love as a sickness causes suffering just as in Theocritus, but through constant progression on a cursus amoris, this suffering is overcome with the help of the gods.
Daphnis and Chloe represents a myth that idealizes and romanticizes everything into a carefree, original state of nature. The gods are ubiquitously present and not pushed into the background, as in other novels. Tyche, on the contrary, is practically absent as a motivation for the plot. Additionally, the divine beings seem entirely self-explanatory and are at one with nature. Consistent with the subject matter and the location, Eros, the nymphs, Pan, and Dionysus stand at the center. The protagonists are true heroes of a prehistoric age. Daphnis is a mythical figure known to all, the personification of the bucolic lover. His tragic biography is difficult to reconstruct. He has fallen into unrequited love with a nymph and swears eternal loyalty to her, yet is admittedly disloyal, loses her, and suffers interminably (Wojaczek 1969, 5–21; Hunter 1983, 22–31; Schmidt 1987, 57–70). Chloe, on the contrary, is rather a fictitious character. As a typical nymph with the name “the green-sprouting one,” she refers to nature budding in the process of maturation. In addition, the label is frequently connected to Demeter (Paus. 1.22.3), in whose honor a festival of the Chloia is also documented in Eleusis.
The two protagonists’ contact with the gods is entirely self-explanatory. As corresponds to the theme of love that is central to the novel, Eros is a decisive deity who holds the strings of the mythic plot in his hands. In an inserted speech by Pan, who appears to Bryaxis, the leader of the Methymnans, and admonishes him to give back the kidnapped Chloe, the mythic and religious dimension is directly addressed: “You have torn a girl away from the altars out of whom Eros wants to make a mythos” (ἀπεσπάσατε δὲ βωμω̑ν παρθένον ἐξ 
ς Ἔρως μυ̑θον ποιη̑σαι θέλει, 2.27.2; Morgan 1994, 75–77). Pan reminds us that Eros wishes to “make a myth” out of Chloe. This god is the tutelary deity and director of the exemplary story. The author, on the other hand, is the last authority who “composes” (ποιη̑σαι) exactly such a myth out of Chloe.
Therefore, in the eyes of Longus, the story is to be equated to a myth from the beginning to end. Eros is responsible for the children’s mythical exposure story, for the outbreak of lovesickness, and for its remedy by means of a conventional wedding. While in other novels he acts in vengeance for hybris displayed toward him, here he merely wishes to initiate a model and, to a certain extent, etiological story, namely of how two young people become acquainted with love in order to finally come to sexual fulfillment through intercourse in the waves of the pubescent confusion of emotions. This arduous path is linked with social norming and the adoption of appropriate gender roles. In this way, myth is given as an exemplary paideia in the anthropologically, sociologically, and psychologically explosive subject of learning sexual behavior as a pedagogical guideline, propaedeutics, and material for reflective reminiscence for all others (pf. 4).
Bucolic nature supplies the enabling framework for the meeting of the two sexes and represents the scenario of mythic origin. In addition, Eros is the original, cosmic force of the entirety of natural life being born, through which the novel as a whole turns into a comprehensive allegory and a type of song of praise for love. The mystery of love is elevated and simultaneously reduced to the consummation of sexual intercourse through the course of the plot.
Myth is the story of the gods. In the novel, Eros functions rather more in what is hidden and manifests himself only through the narrated epiphany before Philetas, yet still more clearly in concrete mental and physical symptoms. Like Eros, the nymphs and Pan—the other divinities suitable for the rustic and erotic context with a central function in the plot—also show themselves, but mainly to humans with direct messages in dreams.
The novelistic characters are situated in a natural relationship of patronage with Pan and the nymphs; they help, rescue, and bring resolution through concrete miracles wherever it is necessary. The nymphs represent the mythic embodiments of brides who stand at the threshold from girl to woman like Chloe. Chloe’s violent removal from their altars at the hands of the people of Methymna (2.27.2) processes the girl’s threatening fantasy of being abducted by the numerous men in her vicinity and being made sexually compliant. To the contrary, Pan symbolizes the rustic, ithyphallic aggression that the young man must develop in order to penetrate for sexual intercourse. Daphnis laments to the nymphs (2.22), who thereafter appear to him while he sleeps, over supposedly lacking support. They bring succor because Chloe as their counterpart is particularly close to their heart. Above all, they prayed to Pan to intervene (2.23.4). Daphnis and Chloe have not honored Pan up to this point and thus neglected the phallic, masculine element to their detriment. The bellicose god now effects a miracle and, as we have seen, insistently appeals to Bryaxis in a dream (2.27) to let the girl go, to which the chieftain immediately commits himself. Chloe is rescued, and from then onward, Daphnis approaches the dimension of Pan by mimetically acting out the sexual pursuit of Syrinx in dance with Chloe (2.37).
Throughout the novel, every danger and all negativity are quickly banished as in a fairytale. The natural proximity to the divinities named earlier, particularly to the nymphs and Pan, is expressed in a (nearly absurd) cultic relationship. Their original intimacy is complemented by deep reverence and religious dedications, as we know from the early epigrams of one Anyte. The protagonists dedicate themselves and objects to the gods over and over again, such that the novel, according to the view of G. Rohde (1937, 43), becomes almost an “Auffaltung und Erweiterung eines bukolischen Weihepigrammes” (“upfolding and expansion of a bucolic dedicatory epigram”).
Cult and ritual, festivals and dances overlap with myth, and are, in part, its direct staging. Dionysus spans the concrete, carnal aspect of the erotic triad (Eros, the nymphs, and Pan). He belongs to the genius loci of Lesbos. As is well known, Bacchus alternates between numerous oppositions, namely, between violence and peace, war and peace, lies and truth, man and woman; between Ares and Eros/Aphrodite, archaic chaos and the bucolic idyll (Bierl 1991, 13–20). In Dionysophanes, Dionysus appears to a certain extent as himself and becomes definitive for the last book. Book 4 begins with an impressive description of a garden fenced off from nature that Daphnis has to tend for the upcoming visit of his master. In the middle of the paradeisos stands a temple of the god with pictured scenes from his mythology (4.3) that refer back to the freize from the preface. At the same time, the novel is reflected in Dionysiac myth and ritual.
The garden, whose care demands labor (πόνος), is a symbol both for the entire novel, whose artistry requires polishing (ἐκπονει̑ν, cf. pf. 3), and for the girl’s chaste sexual organ. Two successive actions by Lampis demonstrate the preceding point, namely, the destruction of the garden out of frustration over not winning Chloe (4.7.1–3) and the predatory attack on Chloe herself, which is further developed in the chain of signifiers (4.28.1). In his portrayal, Longus blurs the bucolic poetry of Theocritus with another “pastorally” marked world of Egypt, which frequently provides a typical scenario of the “other” in other novels. Cruel boukoloi-bandits make their mischief in the marshes of the Nile delta and thereby embody the symbolic threat to the pure virgin in their interaction with the couple (Bertrand 1988). At the same time, the pastoral world signifies a transition stage of civilization on the path to agriculture (Baudy 1993, especially 302 n. 63). In this way, bucolic poetry, to which Longus hearkens back, becomes functionally meaningful as well. The genre of Theocritus, the erotic discourse of boukoloi, is transposed to a certain extent by Longus from the Egyptian exterior to the interior of Lesbos in order to likewise—but here in a fully sugarcoated way—express the rite de passage in the state of marginality. Lampis is just such a boukolos along with Dorcon, too, whose assaults are scarcely recognized and quickly forgiven in the harmless myth.
Besides Dionysus, Demeter plays a certain role in the novel, but more on a symbolic level. Both gods, who are also associated with significant mystery cults, take on the function of expressing the process of sexual maturation as the natural growth of vegetation through viticulture and agriculture and thematically linking sexual intercourse with the mystery of love. In many respects, the loving couple is reflected in these deities.
Consistent with the tendency of ritual to depict conditions of the life cycle and nature at the forefront, in the Ur-myth of love the initiation of Daphnis and Chloe is very skillfully paralleled with the cycle of nature and fertility. In the course of a year and a half, the story plays out from spring to autumn of the next year. The telos of marriage is brought into congruence with the autumnal ripening and the harvest time of agriculture and viticulture. The time of the shepherds’ presence, in which Longus’ ontogenetic development novel is set, represents a phylogenetic period that leads to the independent farmer who nourishes himself through his own cultivation.
Since sexuality and eroticism in the Greek world is metaphorized in particular through the world of nature, vegetation, flowers, trees, and fragrances; through agriculture, ploughing, the harvest and threshing; and through viticulture, ripening, plucking and pressing (Henderson 1991, 166–169), the interpretive paradigm of fertility that is central to the interpretation of myth possesses great importance. The entire plot of Longus’ novel is synchronized with the course of the seasons and with agrarian festivals and culminates in autumn with a harvest celebration. The first year climaxes in the Dionysian wine festival where the sexes come together in dance and music (2.1–2.2.2). In intoxication, the surrounding women tease Daphnis, and celebrating men Chloe. These salacious, verbal innuendos violate the feelings of the couple, who secretly and as yet unconsciously love each other. For this reason, they wish to return again soon to their solitary meadows. There they play even more frolicsomely. An old cowherd by the name of Philetas approaches them and inducts them theoretically into the secrets of love through his narrations. Around the end of the second book, the farmers bring the season to a close with autumn festivals (2.31–37). They dance the winter dance (2.36.1) and celebrate the Oschophoria (2.31–32). At the beginning of the third book, it is winter, which also interrupts the close contact between the lovers. All of nature freezes, and we wait for the “rebirth from death” (3.4.2). In the house of Dryas, they celebrate the Rural Dionysia, the Διονύσια ἐν ἀγροι̑ς (3.9.2; 3.10.1; 3.11.1–2). In spring, when Daphnis and Chloe can once again drive their animals to the meadows, love reawakens between the shepherds’ children. In summertime, Daphnis becomes a man through Lycainion’s sexual instruction. In the meantime, Chloe’s parents have scheduled her wedding for the time of the grape harvest (3.25.4); the suitor who offers the most will take Chloe as his wife. At the threshing of the wheat on the threshing floor (3.29.1), the story reaches its critical point: with the money that he has found, Daphnis can stop at the house of Dryas and ask for Chloe’s hand in marriage, who is related to Demeter through her very name. At the end of the third book, Daphnis plucks an apple in autumn after the harvest that is left over at the very top of the tree (3.33.4–3.34). At the grape harvest in the fourth book (4.1.1; 4.33.1; 4.38), the story finally comes to its happy telos that consists of marriage and the consummation of marriage on the estate of Dionysophanes.
Longus describes, over the course of four books, how long two youths need until they can finally convey the overwhelming emotion of love, which is described as an illness, into the joint and mutually pleasurable sexual act through three remedies—the kiss, the embrace, and lying naked next to one another (2.8.5; Bretzigheimer 1988). This absurd constellation becomes plausible through dislocation into a childlike, original state of the “very first time” in mythic prehistory, whereby the characters are still embedded in a conventional social environment. As foundlings, they are first removed from this society, on account of which they grow up in a pastoral landscape, fairly isolated from other influences and completely naive. In spite of their knowledge of writing, they are fully ignorant in eroticis. This portrayal becomes credible through its specific mythic anchoring, which is also peculiar to the Eidyllia of Theocritus (G. Rohde 1937). While a strong “demythologizing” tendency can be established in the work of Theocritus at the same time, and thereby clearly the exemplarity of myths is broken and contested (Fantuzzi 2000), Longus attempts to reverse this trend in accordance with the later evolution of bucolic poetry. He gives a mythic finish to the whole novel, though Theocritus’ mindset remains simultaneously present (Chalk 1960 and G. Rohde 1937; see Bernsdorff 2006, 186–188, for the treatment of mythos in bucolic poetry according to Theocritus).
Longus designs the entire novel as a mythologized nature in which Eros, in the sense of the Orphic protogonos, also receives all of the attributes of a cosmic power of benevolent harmony (2.7.1–4). Praise of Eros on the part of Philetas takes place in hymnic tones. Likewise, the novel’s connection to the “bukolischen Symbolsprache der Mysterien” (“bucolic, symbolic language of the mysteries”) is cultically employed in the sense of a mystery of love (G. Rohde 1937, 46–47; see Zeitlin 2008, 101–103, on the mysteries of love). Merkelbach was misled in mistaking these literary strategies for unequivocal evidence, from which he deduced his greatly contested thesis that the novel is a “Mysterientext” (“mystery text”; e.g. Merkelbach 1988, and for a rebuttal, Bierl 2007, especially 250, 258–265).
At the same time, the concept of mimesis turns up repeatedly in the mythic finish: as is well known, mimesis is the reenactment of a divine model in song and dance (Nagy 1990b, 42–45, 339–413, especially 346, 349, 373–375). Longus makes recourse to myth and nature in order to evoke the semblance of originality. Remythologization and renaturalization establish a mythic archetype for the everyday practice of human love in an artificial way (Billault 1996). Every person undergoes this developmental phase, and for everyone there is a “first time.” Concurrently, the literary search for this actual origin exhibits signs of its own deconstruction, for the mythical protagonists are not really the first humans to discover sexuality. It turns out that their natural existence—including their exposure and suckling by animals, here characteristically goats and not predatory wolves, are typical motifs of myth—nevertheless traces back to real, conventional parents and normal procreation. All of the people around them know the secrets of love. Only they live in childish naïveté that is in need of enlightenment.
Muse and song are the media of the mythic mode of expression, particularly since the archaic poet once viewed himself as the inspired mediator of the muses. By way of Theocritus and Philetas, the founder of the bucolic genre, Longus hearkens back to the mythic singer Daphnis (for Philetas as the learned founder of the genre, see Bowie 1985; Hunter 1983, 76–83; Whitmarsh 2005; contra Di Marco 2006, 490–492). In matters of love, we find the ultimate justification in Eros himself. After the old man, not coincidentally named Philetas, “kisser” (Philetas named the kiss as the first remedy; for Philetas’ name, see Di Marco 2006, 491–492), initiates the ignorant young people theoretically into the secret of love through the narration of his encounter with Eros (2.3–6), the author says that they were so amused by his words, “as if they heard a mythos, not a logos” (ὥσπερ μυ̑θον οὐ λόγον ἀκούοντες, 2.7.1). In a humorous inversion of the sentence suggesting a progression “from mythos to logos”—this conception was thoroughly propagated not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also among the Greeks in the age of the so-called Greek Enlightenment—reference is made anew to the remythologization of the whole novel (see Most 1999 for the mutual dependence of these concepts). To be sure, it is the concretely prosaic work of Longus, i.e. reality, at least in the fictional prose, but at the same time it is actually and entirely mythos, i.e. a novel cloaked in myth. In this symbolically charged form of myth, the story of the traumatic, liminal experience that the pubescent youths live through on the path to adulthood is narrated in a particularly impressive way similarly to a dream sequence. The regress by way of literary to mythic forefathers imitates the etiological tendency of myth. The story justifies by recurring to the ἀρχαί, to the canonical literary models in the sense of intertexuality, and finally to a mimetic mythos. The last source in this mythologized representation is Eros himself, who appears to Philetas as a winged boy, the πρω̑τος εὑρετής of the bucolic genre, in reality.
The mythic aspect already plays a clear role in Longus’ metaliterary preface. Facetiously and in obvious reliance on Thucydides’ programmatic and methodic preliminary remarks (1.22.4), Longus says that he dedicates his novel as a votive offering to Eros in agonistic competition with a frieze (εἰκόνος γραφήν, pf. 1). This frieze is identical to an image which Daphnis and Chloe cultically dedicate after their wedding (4.39.2) and which the author translates into writing (pf. 3). In this way, an effective, cultic ring composition arises that simultaneously provides authentication. He writes that his novel is:
but an enjoyable possession for all men, which will serve as healing for the sick, consolation for the grieving, a reminder for those who know of love, and for those who know nothing of love as an instructive preparation (… κτη̑μα δὲ τερπνὸν πα̑σιν ἀνθρώποις, ὃ καὶ νοσου̑ντα ἰάσεται καὶ λυπούμενον παραμυθήσεται, τὸν ἐρασθέντα ἀναμνήσει, τὸν οὐκ ἐρασθέντα προπαιδεύσει, pf. 3).
With the κτη̑μα τερπνόν, Longus clearly alludes to Thucydides’ famous statement (1.22.4). In this passage, the historian sets himself distinctly apart from the mythic style of his predecessor Herodotus, who only caters to the listeners’ enjoyment during a performance. With this work, which as a pragmatic, fact-oriented historiography that does not operate on the basis of myth (μὴ μυθω̑δες), and in its brittleness can scarcely elicit a pleasant feeling of enjoyment (ἀτερπνέστερον) from the recipient, Thucydides has much more the purpose of benefit as a κτη̑μα ἐς αἰεί in mind. Longus facetiously counters this statement in a dialogic manner: with the juncture κτη̑μα τερπνόν, Longus defends his fictionality as a useful value that still provides enjoyment in addition.6 In this way, the text’s myth-like quality is, of course, implicitly vindicated as well, for his novel is not only plasmatic and fictional, but rather is also based on myth as an underlying structure, like in Herodotus.
In the rhetorical diction, astonishingly, we find an allusion to popular, fantastic wonder tale (in modern Greek, παραμύθια) regarding the novel’s effect, besides Platonic and sophistic conceptions of reminder (ἀνάμνησις) and propaedeutics (Alexiou 2002, 151–171, especially 162–167, and 211–265; Bierl 2007, 255–258). Like the stories that typically deal with magic, crisis, and dream scenarios, the novel supposedly effects recovery along with a mythic or “para-mythic” rehabilitation of the afflicted and those suffering from love by way of the performance of the text. In reading as well as hearing such a text that plays on the liminal situation of the crisis of coming of age and strings together a heaping of traumatic adventures in a specific metaphorology, we find validation or even consolation for our fears analogous to a ritual or a myth based on a ritual, ergo παραμυθία, cf. pf. 4).
The metadiegetic and inlaid myths located each time around the end of the first three books, which are clearly labeled as such,7 deepen the novel’s etiological statement, namely, thematizing and problematizing the critical transition of the girl becoming an adult woman. Also, myth is sometimes equated with obscure and erudite mythology, with which the claim of authenticity comes into conflict. The sagas of the wood dove/Phatta (1.27), Syrinx (2.34), and Echo (3.23) represent three stories of metamorphosis depicting the transformation of a maiden. Every time the union of love fails, and the girls are not at all interested in the male partner. In addition, the sagas are connected with music.
In scholarship, the escalation of brutality toward the girls has been emphasized. Syrinx flees into the marsh and is cut off as a reed by the angry Pan. He assembles the blades together into a flute, whose sound is based on the differing lengths of its pipes and hence emblematically embodies the inequality of the sexes. Echo sings and dances with the nymphs, the young brides, in the round and flees from Pan. Out of jealousy over her song and furious over not reaching his sexual satisfaction, he causes a Dionysian madness among the shepherds, on account of which they tear the girl into pieces. The earth, i.e. Demeter, covers over her scattered limbs and sends forth voices imitating her by the will of the Muses. At the same time, the stories are skillfully interwoven with the course of the plot, with Longus’ myth, as increasing tension and growing imbalance between the sexes along with escalating male aggression are brought into focus, and according to MacQueen (1990, 31–97), Chloe’s metamorphosis in the fourth book proves to be the fourth myth and the foundational theme of the whole novel. She is transformed from a slave to a freeborn girl and from a foundling to the daughter of rich parents. On the wedding night, above all, the decisive step from being a virgin (παρθένος) to womanhood (γυνή) is completed (cf. the ending 4.40.3; cf. 3.24.3). By means of these inlaid musical myths, the effect of a mise en abyme comes into being, through which the novel once again gains the finish of a myth.
The following passage around the end of the story shows to what extent mythos, consistent with the novel’s genre, signifies plasmatic fictionality or even free invention. Lamon is in great distress about preventing the surrender of his protégé Daphnis as a sex slave to Gnathon and therefore appeals directly to his master Dionysophanes with tokens of identification. With a strict countenance, he admonishes Lamon “to tell the truth, and not to fabricate something that is like myths” (τἀληθη̑ λέγειν μηδὲ ὅμοια πλάττειν μύθοις, 4.20.1). He has already proven how skillfully he can narrate myths in presenting the saga of Pan and Syrinx (2.24–2.35.1). From an urbane and enlightened perspective, the entire story appears to be merely the fictional, plasmatic invention of a fairytale. Besides πλάσματα, μυ̑θοι serves as the terminus technicus for the content of ancient novels (Kerényi 1927, 1–23; on μυ̑θοι, 13). Yet, here, consistent with the author’s strategy, the matter operates differently.
The μυ̑θοι stand in the gap between free, fanciful invention and authentic myth, between lies and truth. With this statement, the novel once again turns into mythos, since we have indeed become witnesses that the exposure story truly occurred. The tokens of recognition vouch for factuality, and as we have seen, exposure is the classic example of a Greek myth that determines the plot—Aristotle expressly calls it μυ̑θος (e.g. Poet. 1450a4–5)—of some of Euripides’ tragedies and numerous plays from New Comedy. For this reason, the novel’s plot is sometimes labeled in theory or in metapoetic testimonies as δρα̑μα, τραγῳδία, or κωμῳδία, too (Kerényi 1927, 12–17).
The authenticity of Daphnis and Chloe is indeed fractured, a fact that could be traced back to the generally demythologizing tendency of Theocritus. In spite of their displacement into the childish naïveté of an unattainable originality, which is notoriously elusive, the children are educated in writing and well read in mythology, even if they do not know the name of Eros at all. Accordingly, Daphnis is aware of the exemplariness of Zeus, Pan, and Dionysus in a singing contest with Dorcon (1.16.3–5). Also, like the other shepherds, he is otherwise well acquainted with reciting obscure mythology. Thus, all of those present at the celebration in honor of Dionysus on the country estate of Dryas highlight the festival with mythology and song (3.9.4)—that is, ritual is treated as an opportunity for performative depictions of polished myths about Dionysus. In addition, the author employs exempla from mythology for describing the mythic Daphnis, such as Apollo’s service as a shepherd in the house of Laomedon (4.14.2), through which his ephebic nature is also brought into focus (Bierl 1994). Truly well versed in erudite mythology are the perverted city dwellers such as Gnathon who, in response to Astylos’ question of whether he is not disgusted by the billy goat stench from Daphnis, whom he adores, supplies a whole series of mythological exempla in which gods likewise loved shepherds. For as a parasite, he became a sophistic connoisseur or πεπαιδευμένος in the entirety of erotic mythology (πα̑σαν ἐρωτικὴν μυθολογίαν … πεπαιδευμένος, 4.17.3) among the banquets.
The shepherds themselves admittedly refer to an innocent pastoral mythology. Even after Daphnis and Chloe arrive in a rich, urban house, they soon go back to the country again. In spite of its amenities, city life is unbearable to them, and after their urban wedding, they celebrate a country wedding. In the style of ring composition, they return to their bucolic existence and become a mythic model by also nursing the children born from their marriage with a goat and a sheep. Furthermore, their action is wholly directed toward piety and the cultic veneration of the rustic gods who are so closely connected to them.
Daphnis and Chloe is an ideal, mythic love novel, since it hearkens back to the imagery of nature, which is central for love and erotic beauty. Flowers, plants, buds, fruits; trees and arborvitae trees; birds, geese, and eagles; grazing animals, billy goats leaping, hunting, and catching birds; pasturing and piping on flutes; the external appearance, hair, love gardens, springs, baths, and water; blooming and withering; the burning of the sun, tears, blood, and nourishment—in short, nearly every detail as well as every movement and activity that appears in the text is part and parcel of the symbolic, image-rich language of love. This imagery belongs to the fixed cultural inventory of the early Mediterranean world. In the archaic period of ancient Greece, the metaphorical field was stabilized through poetry, with the result that it lives on in the complete corpus of Greek and, later, Western art and culture until today (Alexiou 2002, 349–410; on imagery, see Bowie 2005). This material is expanded in the work of Longus in a signifying chain through metaphors and metonymies that express gliding in the state of intense, mutual desire.
The hero and heroine are thus two “greenhorns” (cf. ἡ χλόη, “young verdure”) who must painstakingly learn the sexual act. This natural, instinct-driven action is magnified into a difficult techne. The author and the reader regard such a παιδεία in eroticis with smirks (Morgan 1996). The erotic cooperation of a mythical world in this plot, in which everything is linked on the level of micro- and macrocosm, stands for a type of Orphic harmony of Eros.
Harmony with nature is produced not only thematically but also medially. The novel is a complete, synaesthetic work of art. Longus works with all of the poetic technai and media, upon which the aesthetic, mythological research tradition since the time of Giambattista Vico and Johannn Gottfried Herder and the stylistic analysis of Longus have elaborated (Graf 1991, 17–18, 23). The rhythmically designed prose is a mimesis of lyric poetry, and the musical element of the pastoral world is paired with poetry. In addition, all of the other arts are incorporated, including dance, mime, literature, and, above all, painting. Pictorial cycles in a triad structure,8 which highlight the status of Daphnis and Chloe in parallel and end in a common scene, give the impression of separation, love, and reunion. Ring composition, hyperbata, symmetries, analogies, and parallelisms accomplish this goal in the micro-area of language. Longus’ art lies in composing poetry in prose and thereby employing all of Gorgias’ figures of speech, such as parallelism, anaphora, homoeoteleuton, isocolon, parison, dicolon, tricolon, alliteration, asyndeton, hyperbaton, and chiasmus, as well as prose rhythm with a clausula technique (Hunter 1983, 84–92, on γλυκύτης, 92–98; Pattoni 2005, 139–144). In interchange with the gods and nature, a ritual and mythic feeling of reverberation and reciprocity arises everywhere, which is in turn transferred to the couple in love. The mythic aspect is, to a certain extent, the superordinate concept that encompasses all of these complementary effects of content and form.
The most important element for the mythic dimension is Longus’ specific iconicity (Zeitlin 1990, 430–444, and Zimmermann 1999b, 72–79). In the etiological preface, he speaks of transforming a frieze with erotic content found in a nymph’s grove into the medium of a text, ergo into our novel. A longing (πόθος) descends upon him, namely, of undertaking a change in medium (ἰδόντα με καὶ θαυμάσαντα πόθος ἔσχεν ἀντιγράψαι τῃ̑ γραφῃ̑, pf. 3). The sophist is motivated not by desire for a girl, but rather by the literary exercise of replacing one sign system with another, i.e. of carrying out the transposition of a pictorial into a textual γραφή and thereby still scoring against the image and engaging in competition with it. At the same time, this passage is an allusion to the fact that the author is vying with Theocritus’ Eidyllia, the vignettes or lyric snapshots of musical expression.
Longus employs all the tools of renaturalization and remythologization to confer a finish of idealism on the novel that he deconstructs at the same time. The reversion to childish mimesis is always pleasing (according to Aristotle’s Poet. 1448b4–12, imitation is characteristic of humans from childhood onward and is linked to pleasure). Incidentally, myth is identified with the humanity’s childhood history in the research of the early modern era (Graf 1991, especially 15, 20, 32). The reader is consequently lulled into this world which, however, is only established through an artificial process of mimesis. For sophists such as Longus, the gods are admittedly no longer unconditionally religious entities in which one really believes, but rather more secularized gods of literature. Longus oscillates between myth and mythology. He needs myth for the creation of a natural dimension of originality, which turns out to be an enabling structure and precondition for his story. At the same time, the author makes reference to the technical craft of this aesthetic medium of composition through purposeful breaks and ironic comments. The artificial, contrived nature of the mythical world is admittedly so complete that it evokes the pretense of authenticity and authoritativeness. After all, Daphnis and Chloe reads like a new, artful myth in the shape of an old Ur-myth or fairytale that provides the etiology of the ritual coming of age.
1 I am currently writing a monograph on this aspect with respect to the entire corpus of ancient romances.
2 Kerényi 1927, 43; cf. “Hellenisierung–Humanisierung” 263 and the Nachbetrachtungen of the 2nd edition (“Nachwort über die Methode”), especially 291 n. 2.
3 See Di Marco 2006, 479–481. On Longus, see now both commentaries by Morgan 2004 with bibliography ix–xv and Pattoni 2005 with an extensive introduction and bibliography, plus the central article by Zeitlin 1990. On mythos in the work of Longus, in addition to G. Rohde 1937 and Chalk 1960, see the observations of Zeitlin 1990, 452–455.
4 See E. Rohde 1876, 531–554, especially his scathing verdict 549–550; for this reason, E. Rohde is the forefather of the criticism of Longus as unserious, negative, ironic, deconstructing, and sexually voyeuristic; cf. Bretzigheimer 1988; Winkler 1990; Goldhill 1995, 1–45.
5 Goethe’s judgments are compiled by Grumach 1949, 316–320; cf. Zimmermann 1999a; Goethe thus establishes the serious and positive interpretation of Longus; see G. Rohde 1937; Chalk 1960; Morgan 2004, 9–10.
6 The novel is dulce et utile; it benefits and delights the reader (cf. prodesse et delectare, Hor. AP 333).
7 Cf. μυ̑θος 2.33.3; 2.35.3; 2.37.1; 3.22.4. Daphnis completes the process of μυθολογει̑ν: μυθολογω̑ν 1.27.1. See also 3.23.5 and 3.22.4 μυθολογει̑ν τὸν μυ̑θον.
8 Cf. Schissel von Fleschenberg 1913, 81–94, and appendix 105–109 (12 images in a triptychon structure which are brought into a sequence); also Chalk 1960, 39–43.
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Bierl, A. 2007. “Mysterien der Liebe und die initiation Jugendlicher. Literatur und religion im griechischen Roman.” In Literatur und Religion II. Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen, edited by A. Bierl, R. Lämmle, and K. Wesselmann. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, pp. 239–334. Offers an almost book-length, lively, and original analysis of the religious dimensions of the novel and the interaction of myth, ritual, and literary aspects.
Billault, A. 1996. “La nature dans Daphnis et Chloé.” Revue des études grecques, 109: 506–526.
Bowie, E.L. 1985. “Theocritus’ seventh Idyll, Philetas and Longus.” Classical Quarterly, 35: 67–91.
Bowie, E. 2005. “Metaphor in Daphnis and Chloe.” In Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, edited by S. Harrison, M. Paschalis, and S. Frangoulidis. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 4. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing: Groningen University Library, pp. 68–86.
Bretzigheimer, G. 1988. “Die Komik in Longos’ Hirtenroman Daphnis und Chloe.” Gymnasium, 95: 515–555.
Burkert, W. 1979. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burkert, W. 1996. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Chalk, H.H.O. 1960. “Eros and the Lesbian pastorals of Longos.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 80: 32–51 (reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner. Hildesheim: Olms 1984, pp. 388–407). Provides a classic and affirmative interpretation of the religious and bucolic aspects of Longus.
Cueva, E.P. 2004. The Myths of Fiction: Studies in the Canonical Greek Novels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Di Marco, M. 2006. “The pastoral novel and the bucolic tradition.” In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral, edited by M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis. Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 479–497.
Effe, B. 1982. “Longos. Zur Funktionsgeschichte der Bukolik in der römischen Kaiserzeit.” Hermes, 110: 65–84.
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Henderson, J. 1991. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hunter, R.L. 1983. A Study of Daphnis and Chloe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Presents a brilliant introduction to Longus.
Jakobson, R. 1971. “Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances.” In Roman Jakobson: Selected Writings II. Word and Language, edited by S. Rudy. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, pp. 239–259.
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MacQueen, B.D. 1990. Myth, Rhetoric, and Fiction: A Reading of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Merkelbach, R. 1988. Die Hirten des Dionysos: Die Dionysos-Mysterien der römischen Kaiserzeit und der bukolische Roman des Longus. Stuttgart: Teubner. Interprets Daphnis and Chloe as a mystery text that could be understood only by the initiated.
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 and New York: Routledge, pp. 64–79.
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Morgan, J.R. 2004. Longus. Daphnis and Chloe. Translation with an Introduction and Commentary. Warminster: Aris & Philipps. Is the only available English commentary at the moment and accessible for students approaching Longus for the first time.
Most, G.W. 1999. “From logos to mythos.” In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by R. Buxton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–47.
Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pattoni, M.P. 2005. Longo Sofista. Dafni e Cloe. Introduzione, traduzione e note. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. Offers a good commentary in Italian, with an extensive introduction and bibliography.
Reardon, B.P. 1994. “Μυ̑θος οὐ λόγος: Longus’s Lesbian pastorals.” In The Search for the Ancient Novel, edited by J. Tatum. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 135–147. Gives a good interpretation of the mythic dimension in Longus.
Rohde, E. 1900. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
Rohde, G. 1937. “Longus und die Bukolik.” Rheinisches Museum, 86: 23–49 (reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner. Hildesheim: Olms 1984, pp. 361–387).
Schissel von Fleschenberg, O. 1913. Entwicklungsgeschichte des griechischen Romanes im Altertum. Halle: Niemeyer.
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Whitmarsh, T. 2005. “The lexicon of love: Longus and Philetas Grammatikos.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 125: 145–148.
Winkler, J.J. 1990. “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.J. Winkler. New York: Routledge, pp. 101–126. Offers a deconstructive picture of the cynical attitude of Longus.
Wojaczek, G. 1969. Daphnis: Untersuchungen zur griechischen Bukolik. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain.
Zeitlin, F.I. 1990. “The poetics of Erôs: Nature, art, and imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by D.M. Halperin, J.J. Winkler, and F.I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 417–464. Provides a brilliant analysis of some key motifs of Longus, on myth especially, pp. 452–455.
Zeitlin, F. 2008. “Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–108. Offers an accessible and thoughtful introduction to the problem of religion in the novel.
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Zimmermann, B. 1999b. “Poetische Bilder. Zur Funktion der Bildbeschreibungen im griechischen Roman.” Poetica, 31: 61–79.
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Chalk, H.H.O. 1960. “Eros and the Lesbian pastorals of Longos.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 80: 32–51 (reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner. Hildesheim: Olms 1984, pp. 388–407).
Cueva, E.P. 2004. The Myths of Fiction: Studies in the Canonical Greek Novels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kerényi, K. 1962. Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. This is the second edition of Kerényi 1927, above.
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Rohde, G. 1937. “Longus und die Bukolik.” Rheinisches Museum, 86: 23–49 (reprinted in Beiträge zum griechischen Liebesroman, edited by H. Gärtner. Hildesheim: Olms 1984, pp. 361–387).
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Zeitlin, F.I. 1990. “The poetics of Erôs: Nature, art, and imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by D.M. Halperin, J.J. Winkler, and F.I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 417–464.