INTRODUCTION
The woods spread their branches all over literature. The woodland is an uncertain space, away from society, shady and wild, full of wonder, wandering, getting lost and coming back transformed: it is the other-world of folklore, the place of Actaeon’s metamorphosis, or the off-stage setting for the rites of Euripides’ bacchants. The depths of the forest are also where the witch lives, who confounds identities with her mysterious, feminine power, turning men into pigs.Footnote 1 At the same time, the forest is there for the taking. From Gilgamesh’s victory over the cedar woods to our own continual victory over the Amazonian rainforest, the cutting down of trees for material use has been foundational in the building of civilization;Footnote 2 both Greek and Roman writers display an awareness of—and ambivalence towards—civilizational deforestation.Footnote 3 Thus the woods are a place of otherness, whether in the deep mysteries they contain, or as a constitutive other, whose subjugation becomes necessary for the progress of human purposes. They are a space of transformation, both in the sense that their unknown powers might transform us and because we, with axes, saws and sandpaper, can transform them.Footnote 4
What is remarkable about the ancient Greek forest, however, is that, linguistically, it comes to signify even more. The word ὕλη is picked up by Aristotle and used to designate ‘matter’. On the analogy of the forest as the wooden material we use and form, ὕλη becomes used for passive matter ready to be shaped. By the Imperial period, Aristotle’s use of the word as ‘matter’ has been adopted by many other schools of thought and is thus employed frequently (see below). At the same time, the basic meaning of ‘woods’ remains, and continues to be used in literary texts. It would therefore appear that, at this stage, the word runs on parallel tracks. This article explores a work where, I argue, those tracks converge.Footnote 5
In Daphnis and Chloe Footnote 6 the word ὕλη appears conspicuously placed at the novel’s end, which should alert us to its importance. The last line of the text describes Chloe’s experience of her wedding night: καὶ τότε Χλόη πρῶτον ἔμαθεν ὅτι τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης γενόμενα ἦν ποιμένων παίγνια (‘and then Chloe learnt for the first time that what had happened in the woods were shepherds’ games’, 4.40.3).Footnote 7 This local designation is surprising, for the greater part of the novel has not taken place in the forest, but in the open pastoral spaces of the fields.Footnote 8 Although some important scenes are indeed set in or around the woods, the fumbling attempts at sex, which should be what Chloe now, on her wedding night, understands to have been mere games, are not. However, as the interpretations of the word παίγνια as a term signalling literary play (ultimately going back to Gorgias) suggest,Footnote 9 this ending is steeped in metaphorical language. C. Maciver suggests that it is precisely metaphorical senses which we should look for in the word ὕλη as well.Footnote 10 In his argument, the word here suggests literary subject-matter, and the final sentence thus functions as a metaliterary comment about the play of genres involved in this novel. Being especially associated with ὕλη, Chloe becomes the focal point for these negotiations.Footnote 11 For Maciver, her experience of the complex sexual politics developed in the novel is overwritten by the novel’s generic self-reflection at the end of the work. But literary subject-matter is not the only, and far from the most common, metaphorical meaning of the term ὕλη. Building on Maciver’s insights, my argument is that ‘matter’ in the philosophical sense is highly relevant to the text, and that this is signposted by the use of this word in significant, and often surprising, passages.
Daphnis and Chloe is a novel which engages closely with philosophy: not only in a rhetorical way, in that phrases from Plato’s Phaedrus serve as embellishment for descriptions of love, but also in that the themes of the novel—education, art and nature, imitation, the origins of love and sexuality—resonate with philosophical themes, and are frequently dealt with in language which suggests a direct engagement with philosophical texts.Footnote 12 Furthermore, the overall premise for the work, the stripping away of all knowledge of love from the protagonists, suggests a semi-philosophical thought-experiment (or indeed allegory)Footnote 13 around these questions.Footnote 14 Within this experimental context, issues of materiality and its manipulation through shaping are raised.
What is more, the novel allegorizes certain spaces. The two gardens, in addition to the grove in the prologue, have been seen as metaphors for the work as a whole, as spaces where the pastoral interaction between nature and culture is especially thematized.Footnote 15 In this way, the novel employs the potential for spaces to contain meanings beyond those recognized by the protagonists: for the characters, the gardens might be just gardens, but for the readers, they have a deeper significance.Footnote 16 So too, I argue, does ὕλη denote both the literal woods which border the pastoral fields as well as a thematic preoccupation with materiality.
The word ὕλη (in the primary sense of ‘forest’) occupies an important role in relation to the three inset tales, stories of metamorphosis with a heavily gendered schema (1.27.1–2, 2.37.3, 3.22.2).Footnote 17 It is also the place of Daphnis’ sexual initiation by Lycaenion (3.16.2–3, 3.20.1–2) and is, as already mentioned, referenced during the protagonists’ wedding night (4.40.3).Footnote 18 In each of these scenes, there is a marked sense of the imposition of gender divisions.Footnote 19 Furthermore, there is an emphasis on change in all of these scenes: change of status for Daphnis, who is ‘made a man’ (σε ἄνδρα ἐγὼ … πεποίηκα, 3.19.3) after his meeting with Lycaenion; change of status for Chloe, who after her wedding night is no longer a παρθένος, a virgin; change in bodily existence for the heroines of the inset metamorphosis myths. These are, as we shall see, significant points in the gendering of the protagonists; but there is a specific point to the connection of these scenes with ὕλη, a word whose history implies transformations with a gendered slant.
HISTORY OF HYLÊ: FORESTS THAT MATTER
Before Aristotle, ὕλη primarily means forest, woodland. The word can also mean ‘wood’, a material; that is, the forest put to use for human purposes. In one passage of Plato, ὕλη must mean ‘matter’ in general (Pl. Phlb. 54c2); but it is with Aristotle that ὕλη is fashioned unambiguously into philosophical ‘matter’.Footnote 20 In Aristotle, ὕλη is tied tightly to the processual. As a concept, matter serves as a factor in the theory of change: ὕλη is that which remains through substantial transformation: ἐστὶ δὲ ὕλη μάλιστα μὲν καὶ κυρίως τὸ ὑποκείμενον γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς δεκτικόν (‘Most properly, matter is the foundation which is receptive of generation and destruction’, Gen. corr. 320a2–3). In and of itself, ὕλη is indeterminate and therefore also indescribable (τὸ δ᾽ ὑλικὸν οὐδέποτε καθ᾽ αὑτὸ λεκτέον, ‘But matter can never be spoken in and of itself’, Metaph. 1035a8–9), but it has an inherent potential for form. Still, this potential can be realized only through interaction with a shaping and moving principle.Footnote 21 As such, ὕλη functions as the material cause in change, that out of which (ἔκ τινος, Arist. Metaph. 1032a14) something is made.Footnote 22
Furthermore, this transformable matter is fundamentally associated with femininity. In human reproduction, women are said to contribute ὕλη, whereas men contribute the form and the principle of movement, that is, both the formal and the efficient cause in the theory of change (Gen. an. 729a9–11). The male contribution, semen, gives shape to the matter provided by the female contribution, manifested in menstrual blood. Further abstracted, the female principle is material and passive (παθητικόν), whereas the male principle is shaping and active (κινοῦν καὶ ποιοῦν, Gen. an. 729a28–30). Furthermore, the male principle acting upon the female is repeatedly compared to how a craftsman interacts with his material: the contribution of a woodworker to wood is to give the material a certain shape (for example, τὸ μὲν γὰρ σπέρμα ποιεῖ ὥσπερ τὰ ἀπὸ τέχνης, ‘For sperm creates just as craft does’, Metaph. 1034a34). Thus sperm functions as a tool which shapes female matter (Metaph. 1034a34–1034b1; Gen. an. 730b5–32). This imagery of τέχνη will be seen to have implications for the ways men and women interact differently with the matter of the ὕλη in this novel, whether as technical shapers or as material shaped. Moreover, the female is defined by the inability (ἀδυναμίᾳ, Gen. an. 728a) to transform blood-matter into shaping semen.Footnote 23 The male and the female principle are thus defined in relation to each other: on account of not being able to contribute form in the same way as the male does, the female is relegated to the position of contributing just matter. This hierarchy is made explicit as a cosmological explanation for sexual difference: men and women are distinct because form is superior to matter, and because it is better for better things to be separated from worse (Gen. an. 732a3–6).
Aristotle is here propounding a theory of biology, not setting up a moral code for the interaction of men and women. Still, as Butler argues, the emphasis on a certain version of sexed biology cannot be separated from ideologies of gender; the body as described in discourse becomes the materialization of a gendered norm.Footnote 24 Thus, Aristotle’s linking men to superiority, τέχνη, activity and form, and women to inferiority, passivity and matter cannot be thought of as neutral science, but reflects deep-seated cultural associations between men and culture on the one hand and women and nature on the other.Footnote 25 At the moment that ὕλη becomes resignified as the ‘matter’ of philosophical discourse, it is imbued with a gender dynamic which associates it with female passivity. This gendering of ὕλη will also be relevant to the discussion of the novel, as the transformations in the forest are especially concerned with women. In the inset tales of Daphnis and Chloe, the heroines become precisely the material causes for the animal, the object and the phenomenon—for which the three tales, respectively, provide the aetiology. Women here are that ‘out of which’ the new thing is made. Moreover, the philosophical framing of ὕλη highlights how feminized matter is given shape and meaning through the interaction with masculinized τέχνη. Thus we will see in this novel how masculine agents reshape and redefine the feminine elements associated with the forest.
The Aristotelian use of ὕλη was a hit. The word becomes ‘matter’ in, among other, Stoic, Peripatetic, and (Middle-, Neo-) Platonist discourses.Footnote 26 In the latter, ὕλη becomes assimilated with the χώρα of Plato’s Timaeus,Footnote 27 that highly unspecified, but clearly feminized, receptacle-nurse-mother through which the forms pass to produce their material copies.Footnote 28 ὕλη thus continues to be involved in processes of change and generation, and keeps its association with the feminine. For instance, Isis in Plutarch is, in a clear synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian imagery, described as χώρα καὶ ὕλη (De Is. et Os. 372F).Footnote 29 In a looser reuse of concept of ὕλη, Plutarch employs the Aristotelian interaction between matter and form to describe a type of gender relation other than that of reproduction, in the relationship between the Pythia and her god. Here (De def. or. 436E) the human soul of the prophetess is said to function as the material, the ὕλη, which the god manipulates through an instrument.Footnote 30 ὕλη as feminized matter involved in processes of change thus continues to be a topic of concern into Longus’ time.Footnote 31
Another metaphorical meaning of the word ὕλη, although less common than the physical one, is none the less active in the Imperial Greek context. As already alluded to, ὕλη also means ‘stuff’ in the sense of literary subject-matter.Footnote 32 Here again, the cue comes from Aristotle (Eth. Nic. 1094b), and is picked up by Polybius (2.16.14) and Pseudo-Longinus (13.4). This is the sense of the word on which Maciver focusses, seeing the ending as a comment on the novel’s ‘generic games’: the play with genres and tones involved in this hybrid novel.Footnote 33 While a focus on ὕλη as ‘matter’ will yield greater insight into the gender dynamics of the inset tales and beyond, this literary sense of subject-matter will still be relevant, and to an extent inseparable from philosophical ‘matter’. ὕλη as feminized matter is not a natural given, but is constructed out of previous discourses such as the ones outlined above; in this sense, physical matter is made up of literary ‘matter’.Footnote 34
So in Imperial Greek discourse, ὕλη retains its basic meaning of ‘forest’, but the increasingly prevalent senses of philosophical and literary ‘matter’ exist alongside it. Furthermore, there are examples of slippage between the literal and metaphorical use of the word, a dynamic which is at play also in Daphnis and Chloe. For instance, in Lucian’s Prometheus, the Titan describes the world before his creation of humans: ἡ γῆ δὲ ἄγριόν τι χρῆμα καὶ ἄμορφον, ὕλαις ἅπασα καὶ ταύταις ἀνημέροις λάσιος (‘the world was a wild and shapeless thing, covered all over in shaggy, unkept forests’, 12). Here Prometheus uses ὕλη to signify literally wild forests, which covered the primordial world.Footnote 35 But the juxtaposition of the words ὕλαις and ἄμορφον in a scene of creation cannot but evoke, in an author so involved in philosophical discourses as Lucian, the many times that material ὕλη is described as ἄμορφος in philosophical and philosophically inspired texts.Footnote 36
In a larger timeframe, once we arrive at Late Antiquity, the word ὕλη is used for ‘matter’ to such a ubiquitous extent that this meaning becomes inescapable. As Goldhill argues in relation to Nonnus (Dion. 2.650), ‘matter’ has become such a question of debate in Christian and Neoplatonic discourses that ὕλη can no longer be ‘no more than wood’.Footnote 37 In the second century, we are perhaps not yet in a world where that is a simple inevitability. Still, the prevalence of the word in philosophical contexts around this time create a rich polysemy which is activated through the gendered politics of this novel. ὕλη here can be simply wood, but it also has the potential to signify more than that—a potential which this novel puts to work.
INTERPRETING HYLÊ
The matter signified by ὕλη in philosophical discourse is, as we have seen, in and of itself indeterminate, indescribable and shapeless. In the Aristotelian framework, however, it is also that ‘out of which’ something comes to be, and thus has the potential to be something else—a potential realizable only through the imposition of form and a principle of movement. In key passages from Daphnis and Chloe, ὕλη functions similarly as a field of potential, as something which demands shaping and resignification.
The forest is introduced into the text towards the end of the first book: ἔτερψεν αὐτούς ποτε φάττα βουκολικὸν ἐκ τῆς ὕλης φθεγξαμένη, καὶ τῆς Χλόης ζητούσης μαθεῖν ὅ τι λέγει διδάσκει αὐτὴν ὁ Δάφνις μυθολογῶν τὰ θρυλούμενα (‘Once a woodpigeon delighted them with bucolic sounds from the woods. Chloe sought to learn what it was saying, and Daphnis taught her, repeating the old myth’, 1.27.1). Chloe’s ‘seeking to learn’ presents the sounds coming out of the ὕλη as not signifying on their own, but needing the human process of art to be understandable. As the source of the non-understood sounds, ὕλη becomes that ‘out of which’Footnote 38 the subsequent transformation will occur. The woods thus provide an unrealized potential, which can be realized through a process of shaping. This shaping is represented by Daphnis’ story-telling, which makes the song make sense by placing it within a narrative frame.Footnote 39 The demand of Chloe, then, is that the products of the ὕλη be given signifying form. Not that the φάττα is not already signified; the text denotes it as a φάττα, and its song is βουκολικόν, singing in tune with the rest of the work.Footnote 40 As a product of the ὕλη, however, its song is open to resignification, as Chloe’s demand makes clear. The transformations involved in the material realm of the ὕλη are thus not final events, but continual reworkings of the stuff which the ὕλη brings forth. As a space not mentioned before, let alone entered, the woods act as the outer barrier of the pastoral world, a space of the not-yet-signified. The ὕλη then, is the realm of the ‘stuff’, the raw material which needs to be articulated.
In the framing of the echo-story, too, the ὕλη is seen as a realm issuing forth undefined sounds, which need to be signified. A crew of fishermen are sailing by, and their singing echoes against the field: κοῖλος γὰρ τὸ πεδίον αὐλὼν ὑπερκείμενος καὶ τὸν ἦχον εἰς αὑτὸν ὡς ὄργανον δεχόμενος πάντων τῶν λεγομένων μιμητὴν φωνὴν ἀπεδίδου (‘For the field, a hollow valley lying above, received the sound into itself like an instrument and returned a sound imitating all that was said’, 3.21.4). Daphnis is impressed by their song, and wishes to carry the echo further, by transposing the song onto his syrinx. Chloe, however, has never heard an echo before, and searches the source of the sound: ποτὲ μὲν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν ἀπέβλεπε τῶν ναυτῶν κελευόντων, ποτὲ δὲ εἰς τὴν ὕλην ὑπέστρεφε ζητοῦσα τοὺς ἀντιφωνοῦντας (‘Sometimes she looked out at the see as the sailors were shouting, sometimes she turned towards the woods, searching the respondents’, 3.22.2). Hearing the same sounds coming from two directions, she turns between the sea and the ὕλη, trying to make out the source of the sound. But why, it has been asked, does she turn towards the forest when in the description of the echo effect the sound was described as resonating towards the fields?Footnote 41 ὕλην (3.22.2) here is the reading of the Vatican manuscript (V). ‘non omnino placet’, Reeve comments, but accepts it on the grounds of it being more likely to have been changed into γῆν, the reading of the other major manuscript (F), than vice versa.Footnote 42 ὕλην is not entirely out of place here; the episode with the singing sailors comes right after Daphnis’ exit from the woods following his meeting with Lycaenion (3.20.2), and so the couple are presumably still sitting by the edge of the forest. None the less, the strangeness of the word being used in Chloe’s reaction to the echo, when it was not in the description of the echo itself, alerts us to its thematic importance. As was the case with the woodpigeon, ὕλη here is the source of puzzling sounds, for which Chloe demands further explanation. Just as Daphnis’ real adventures in the woods are unknown to Chloe, so the woods is where she turns while looking for the unknown. Here, then, is one explanation for the discrepancy between the description of the echo-effect and Chloe’s reaction: in the rationalizing discourse of the narrator, who understands and explains how the sound resonates, the phenomenon takes place in the fields: open, overseeable spaces. Chloe, however, to whom the echo provides a mystery, turns towards that mysterious space of unformed materiality, the ὕλη. As with the sound of the wood-pigeon, the echo is for Chloe a sound from the ὕλη which requires signification. Furthermore, Chloe’s absurd naïveté about the sounds from the ὕλη again becomes the occasion for a story; the myth which Daphnis tells thus responds to the demand for signification of the ὕλη.
Finally, in Daphnis and Chloe’s miming reperformance of the Syrinx-myth, ὕλη functions as a place which itself can be transformed. While restaging the myth told by Lamon, there is a focus on mimetic effects, as Daphnis is walking on tiptoes to imitate Pan’s hooves, and ‘Chloe hides in the woods as though in the marsh’ (Χλόη μὲν εἰς τὴν ὕλην ὡς εἰς ἕλος κρύπτεται, 2.37.3). The forest here represents, in the world of the performance, the marshes in which Syrinx disappeared. Here the ὕλη itself is invested with meaning, resignified as a mythic space. It is thus understood as open for signification, ready to be imbued with meaning and form.
MATERIAL GIRLS
The previous section delineated some of the ways in which ὕλη in this novel is presented as an unknown space, which is associated with transformations whereby the sounds coming out of the woods, or the woods themselves, are redefined. As such, the woods come to resemble the passive matter described in philosophical discourse, which is transformed through the imposition of form. This section is concerned with the association of that shaped materiality with femininity, and the corresponding association of active shaping (especially as represented by τέχνη) with masculinity. The assignment of women to a position of materiality will be seen to reflect not only the limited opportunities for feminine expression in a patriarchal world, but specifically also the role of the παρθένος as someone bound to be redefined within this patriarchal system.
In this context, the inset stories themselves, and not just their frames, become important, as stories of metamorphosis with clearly gendered themes. The story of Phatta, the aetiology of the woodpigeon, is here particularly significant for the gendering of τέχνη (‘art’, ‘craft’). It tells the tale of a supremely skilled musician/cowherd, who tends her flock in the forest (ἐν ὕλῃ, 1.27.2) and keeps watch over them by the power of music alone. A boy shows up, however, and—by dint of his stronger, masculine voice—overpowers her singing and charm away her eight best cows. Devasted both at the loss of her cows and her defeat, she prays to become a bird before she comes back home. The gods then make her into the woodpigeon which Daphnis and Chloe hear, forever singing of her loss. In this story, there is a progression in the gendered relation to τέχνη and ὕλη. At the start of the story, the girl is positioned in the ὕλη. If we hear the material resonances of this word, there is a suggestion that she is partaking in a realm which is open to transformation and resignification. At this point in the story, however, she is in technical control over this hyletic realm, as her shepherding music demonstrates.Footnote 43 After the encounter with the boy, this control over the forest-world is lost, taken by force, because of the superior art of the boy.Footnote 44 Instead, she is made into a part of this world, as a forest animal whose song is illegible without the contribution of masculine art in the form of Daphnis’ story-telling. Phatta is thus made equivalent to the ὕλη, in a double fashion. She is now just a part of the forest and its sounds, rather than an agent acting upon it; and she has become the material out of which the gods fashion the bird—and out of which Daphnis fashions his story. What this first inset tale insists upon, then, is on τέχνη as a primarily masculine domain, and on the transformability of the παρθένος, especially in association with the ὕλη.
In this story, furthermore, we see a two-stage process. First, the boy’s singing deprives the girl of the will to continue existing in the world of agents, and then the gods create the bird. That is to say, the defeat by the boy does not bring about her change, but merely creates the conditions for it; through her grief, she resigns from wishing to participate as a controlling agent of musical art, and instead prays to be remade. In the first stage then, the masculine τέχνη represented by the boy makes her receptive to change, whereas the second stage actualizes that change. We could say that the first stage makes her equivalent to transformable matter, and the second shapes that potential matter into a new form, that of a bird.
A similar two-fold process takes place in the story of Syrinx. Lamon tells of Syrinx, playing, herding and singing, when Pan approaches her to ask for ‘what he desired’, with a promise to reward her through increased fertility of her flocks. Syrinx, however, laughs him off on account of his hybrid goat-man nature.Footnote 45 Thwarted, Pan turns to violence, and attempts to rape her (2.34.2–3). Syrinx tries to flee, but is worn out by her flight. Her force of resistance, her power to retain her self-determination in the face of the attack, is thus spent, and she can no longer remain as she was. She disappears into the marsh, and becomes assimilated to the reeds, out of which Pan creates the instrument. There is thus, again, a twofold transformation, with Pan as the agent in both. In the first instance, Pan provides the principle of movement, in posing an existential threat to Syrinx’s selfhood, to the extent that deprived of the possibility of self-determination, she is transformed into reeds. To escape Pan’s threat, Syrinx is forced to relinquish her active participation in the world of agents, instead assuming the role of matter: literally, as she becomes the reeds out of which the instrument is made. The story of Syrinx, then, highlights the violence of the first phase, her assignment to the position of matter. In the second phase, the reeds are used as the raw material for Pan’s creation of the musical instrument—here he, like the craftsmen to whom Aristotle compares the masculine principle in human reproduction, gives shape to the physical material which was once a girl.
Furthermore, Chloe presents a reading of the Syrinx-myth similar to the one given above. When she and Daphnis swear oaths of fidelity to one another, she rejects his swearing by Pan, on account of that god’s faithless and lecherous nature. In characterizing the lack of support she can expect from Pan, she claims that he would not punish Daphnis ‘even if [he] went to more women than there are reeds in a syrinx’ (2.39.3). Part of what Chloe resists in the myth of Syrinx is precisely the equation of women to material, to reeds in the syrinx, and hence the expendable nature of women in Pan’s perspective.
Chloe in the woods
Chloe is implicated in these myths in ways that indicate that they have bearing on her own change from παρθένος to γυνή.Footnote 46 One such linking crucially also aligns Chloe with the material, when Pan claims that she is ‘the girl out of which Eros wishes to create a story’ (παρθένον ἐξ ἧς Ἔρως μῦθον ποιῆσαι θέλει, 2.27.2). It has often been remarked that this association between Chloe and μῦθος suggests that the inset myths have bearing on her. What I draw attention to here, however, is the peculiar phrasing: Eros, apparently, does not wish to make a story about Chloe, but out of her. She will not necessarily be the subject of the story, but its origin. That is, her role in the mythical creation will be the one played by matter in the Aristotelian formulation, namely that ‘out of which’ (ἔκ τινος, Metaph. 1032a14) something is made.
Chloe, too, is subjected to a two-stage process involving an exclusion from the arenas of expression and subsequent transformation, which thus puts her in a position equivalent to that of matter receptive of change. In her case, this two-stage process consists in a subjection to the role of παρθένος and an acceptance of the social demands of that role, followed by her resignification as a bride. The transition from παρθένος to γυνή is often associated in Greek medical literature with a bodily change; after first intercourse, the new bride’s neck widens, her voice deepens, and her bearing changes.Footnote 47 The bodily transformations undergone by the heroines of the myths thus become exaggerated versions of the bodily change undergone by girls in the παρθένος–γυνή transition. In this way, the social transition is accompanied by a physical one, as a materialization (to think again with Butler) of the former. Chloe’s own metamorphosis, therefore, will also be one that takes place in the materiality of her body, in the ὕλη of her self.
The opening of the myth of Phatta (ἦν παρθένος, παρθένε, ‘There was a girl, girl’, 1.27.2) has been taken as emphasizing that Phatta’s story has ramifications for Chloe.Footnote 48 The polyptoton could also be understood as a form of Althusserian interpellation, that hailing of the subject which causes the subject to be;Footnote 49 Daphnis calling Chloe παρθένος becomes an injunction for her to be a παρθένος and to consider herself in relation to the παρθένος in the story. This story places the παρθένος in a position of inferiority in relation to men and boys.Footnote 50 In this context, therefore, the interpellation of Chloe as παρθένος is an invitation to place herself in this hierarchy, whereby she is to be regarded as less competent than Daphnis in the area of τέχνη.
Moreover, being a παρθένος is a transitory state. The παρθένος as an identity looks forward to the next step in development: to husband and marriage.Footnote 51 In other words, the παρθένος awaits further resignification through male agency.Footnote 52 The injunction to be a παρθένος, therefore, is a demand to be for the sake of becoming, to be in a state that awaits change. This temporality is reflected in the Phatta-story, as the παρθένος ‘was’ (ἦν), but is no more—through her meeting with the boy, she has been transformed into something else. So, too, in the introduction to the more overtly violent myth of Syrinx, there is an acknowledgement of the temporary nature of a παρθένος: ‘The syrinx itself was originally not an instrument but a beautiful girl with a musical voice’ (2.34.1). The musical instrument is not the original state of the syrinx. As in the (certainly related) version told in Achilles Tatius’ novel,Footnote 53 there is here a nostalgia for a lost past—a lost virginity. Both stories thus start with the notion that something was once a παρθένος. There is thus a strengthened impression that παρθένοι can turn into something else, as indeed they are destined to in the social context. These mythical transformations can thus be seen as a reflection of the cultural condition that παρθένοι are understood as transformable material, on their way to be given a new social status defined by patriarchal society. So when Chloe in the context of the Phatta-story is called upon to imagine herself as equivalent to the παρθένος in the ὕλη—two words that both suggest transformability—it is a suggestion that she will be subject to further change, over which she will have little control. It is, then, an assignment to a position of not-yet-formed materiality.
Furthermore, in the mimed re-performance of the Syrinx-story, and Chloe’s re-citing of that performance, there is a stronger sense of the silencing involved in this reshaping into a new role and an indication of Chloe’s relationship to the ὕλη. In the Syrinx-mime, Chloe hides in the ὕλη (2.37.3), and out comes the syrinx. In this way, her departure into the material realm of the ὕλη becomes the occasion for her silencing and replacement by an object.Footnote 54 Metaphorically, she plays the role of the reeds that are cut down for the production of the instrument. In the fictional world of the performance, she is made equivalent to matter, and this transformation is represented by hiding in the ὕλη: being matter is signified by being indiscernible from the forest. Furthermore, for the sake of narrative coherence in the mime, she and the instrument cannot appear on stage at the same time; her disappearance into the woods means that Daphnis now has the audience to himself.Footnote 55 Thus the feminization of matter goes hand in hand with the silencing of women, and the masculinization of τέχνη.
While Chloe in the mime performs this action as a citation of the story told by Lamon, however, she will later re-cite it as a reaction to her own social reality.Footnote 56 So in Book 4 when the urban masters arrive, Chloe again hides in the woods: Χλόη μὲν οὖν εἰς τὴν ὕλην ἔφυγεν ὄχλον τοσοῦτον αἰδεσθεῖσα καὶ φοβηθεῖσα (‘So Chloe fled into the woods, ashamed and afraid in front of so great a crowd’, 4.14.1).Footnote 57 The first act of hiding in the woods, as part of the Syrinx-mime, here takes on additional social meaning, as Chloe reperforms the act under the repressive force of shame.Footnote 58 The proper place for a παρθένος is modestly to avoid the public arena, and Chloe performs that role through her disappearance into the ὕλη. As in the context of the mime, Chloe’s disappearance clears the stage for Daphnis, who is now once again able to impress an audience through his outstanding technical skill on the syrinx (4.15). Furthermore, the specific hiding place suggests that just as Chloe in the Syrinx-mime was metaphorically transformed into the instrument, this hiding in the material realm of the ὕλη will be followed by a new role for her. And indeed, when she reappears onto the social scene, she is transformed. Clearistes, Daphnis’ newly discovered biological mother, dresses her up for the new role as a wife (ἐκόσμει λοιπὸν ὡς υἱοῦ γυναῖκα, 4.31.3), while Dionysophanes, Daphnis’ father, upholds the social order by ensuring that Chloe has remained a virgin (4.31.3). Since Daphnis swears that they have not had sex, Chloe fulfils the defining criterion for a παρθένοςFootnote 59 and is thus suited to be further redefined as a bride. By being dressed up, Chloe acquires a new shape (she is described as εὐμορφοτέρα, ‘more shapely’, 4.32.1), and thus the position of the παρθένος who hid in the ὕλη is one of being reshaped and redefined.
We can thus observe a two-stage process of Chloe’s transformation similar to the one traced for Phatta and Syrinx. First, there is a gradual process of exclusion from the domains of expression, of shaping matter, represented among other things by the interpellation in the Phatta-story and the shorter time on stage in the Syrinx-mime relative to Daphnis, culminating in her absence from the social sphere in Book 4, when she hides in the ὕλη. In this first stage, there is a deprivation of the power to take part actively in the shaping of the world, which instead assigns her to the domain of the shaped; this assignment is symbolically represented by her final exclusion being one of disappearing into the woods. By accepting her role as παρθένος, she is thus made equivalent to matter, to ὕλη. The second stage is her reshaping after this seclusion, under the socializing agents preparing her for marriage. As she had theatrically hidden in the woods to be transformed into a syrinx, so she is now transformed again, but for real.
Women, and girls in particular, are thus made equivalent to matter through enforced silencing and the threat of violence. Through this coercive environment, feminine agents are reduced to a state of passivity, represented by an equivalence with the forest (ὕλη), which suggests the association between women and passive matter. So, too, do the final words of the novel turn towards ὕλη and transformations.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE WOODS
‘And then Chloe learnt for the first time that what happened in the woods was shepherds’ games’ (καὶ τότε Χλόη πρῶτον ἔμαθεν ὅτι τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης γενόμενα ἦν ποιμένων παίγνια, 4.40.3). Here we have arrived at the last words of the novel, and the description of the event to which so much prospective attention has been paid: the consummation of the wedding night, and Chloe’s transition from the status from παρθένος to γυνή. But this final line turns our attention away from the event itself, and instead centres ‘what happened in the woods’. Of all that has been narrated in this novel, then, what is emphasized at the end are those events which relate to the ὕλη. ‘What happened in the woods’, or even ‘what came to be in the woods’—the transformational, metamorphic themes of the scenes relating to ὕλη are recalled in the participle from γίγνομαι: the ὕλη is a site of becoming. Τhe text looks back to these scenes of transformation and metamorphosis in the moment of the most central transformation of the novel, namely Chloe’s socio-sexual transition into a new status.Footnote 60 Her social transition is thus put side by side with the physical metamorphosis of the heroines of the inset tales, and is here related specifically to ὕλη.
The phrase ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης has sometimes caused confusion. What exactly is the meaning of ἐπί here? What kind of relation does the preposition denote? Morgan, possibly over-translating, renders the phrase as ‘on the edge of the woods’, and reads it as symbolic: the woods, as the site of Lycaenion’s lesson (see below), is the space of successful sex, and so the experimentation was taking place around it, ‘on the edge of the sexual space’.Footnote 61 But as Maciver points out, ἐπί with the genitive is elsewhere in Longus simply locative,Footnote 62 and Bowie sees no problem with understanding it as referring to sexual experimentation ‘in woodland’.Footnote 63 On the other hand, Maciver also rightly points towards the vagueness of ἐπί (citing Smyth §1689), and here his dismissal of Morgan’s reading might be too strong; there does appear to be something going on here about the very uncertainty of ὕλη which ἐπί here reinforces. Are we inside or just to the side of the woods? Here is the indeterminacy of transformation, which the preposition helps to bring about.
Throughout the novel, prepositions surround ὕλη, suggesting its indeterminacy as unmarked matter, always a potential rather than a state.Footnote 64 Only once, in the Phatta-story, is an event described as taking place ‘in the woods’ (ἐν ὕλῃ, 1.27.2).Footnote 65 Elsewhere, characters or sounds might either come ‘out of’ the woods,Footnote 66 resonating with the Aristotelian definition of matter as the ἔκ τινος, ‘out of which’ (Arist. Metaph. 1032a14), or else turn towards or enter into the woods.Footnote 67 In both cases, ὕλη becomes a sphere not of fixed situatedness, but of transitions towards or away from.
Moreover, the phrase ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης is elsewhere in Greek used only once with reference to literal woods (Josephus, AJ 18.366). By contrast, the phrase is used extensively by Alexander of Aphrodisias, and later by Plotinus, in the sense ‘relating to matter’.Footnote 68 My claim is not that Longus has read Alexander,Footnote 69 or is indeed alluding to the philosopher, but that, given the transformational associations of ὕλη in this novel, it is significant that the last words include a use of ὕλη which could easily fit into a philosophical context as well. In this way, Chloe’s final entrance into the socially prescribed state of womanhood, as well as the final sign-off of the novel as a whole, is juxtaposed not only to ‘what happened in the woods’, but also to ‘what came to be pertaining to matter’.
DAPHNIS IN THE HYLÊ
Although women are more fundamentally associated with matter, and are, as we have seen, to an extent made equivalent to matter, men cannot help also being made out of material stuff. Furthermore, while the transition from παρθένος to γυνή is raised with more persistence in this novel, the transition from παῖς to ἀνήρ also finds its place. Enter Lycaenion, a woman from the city and seemingly the courtesan of a landowner-farmer,Footnote 70 seeing Daphnis and Chloe’s failed attempt at sex, and being full of desire herself, she schemes to get Daphnis to have sex with her. To rescue a goose which she claims has been stolen from her, Daphnis must come with her into the woods: συνεισελθὼν εἰς τὴν ὕλην (μόνη γὰρ δέδοικα) σῶσόν μοι τὸν χῆνα (‘Come with me into the woods—I’m scared to go on my own—and rescue my goose’, 3.16.3). The ὕλη thus becomes framed as a potentially scary place: a dark, unknown forest. But this forest will serve as the scene for Daphnis’ sexual initiation: Lycaenion teaches Daphnis how to have sex in the forest. Furthermore, before she leaves, Lycaenion interpellates Daphnis in his new role: μέμνησο ὅτι σε ἄνδρα ἐγὼ πρὸ Χλόης πεποίηκα (‘remember that I made you a man before Chloe’, 3.19.3). With this performative statement, Lycaenion has proclaimed Daphnis a man, and the ὕλη has thus been a transformative space for him as well. When he exits the forest (ἐξέβη τῆς ὕλης, 3.20.2) he is not the same as when he entered. Lycaenion’s instructions as to the techniques of sex, and teachings about what sex means, have shaped Daphnis into a new identity. Furthermore, Lycaenion has revealed the function of the ‘swelling’ (σφριγῶντα, 3.18.4) which had been suggested earlier, but which Daphnis did not know how to put into use (οὐδὲν ὧν ἕνεκα ὤργα ποιεῖν ἐπιστάμενος, ‘not knowing how to do any of the things he was swelling for’, 3.14.5). He will thus relate to the matter of his body in a different way, because of his experience in the ὕλη.Footnote 71 In this way, his masculinity is also materialized in the ὕλη. Whereas the heroines of the inset tales discussed above became assimilated with the material realm of the ὕλη, Daphnis’ shaping in the ὕλη instead puts him in a position of greater control. So instead of being forced into equivalence with the woody matter of ὕλη, Daphnis is free to continue reframing the woods, as can be seen in his dissimulation about what happened there, or in his telling the story of Echo.
CONCLUSION
What is matter made out of? According to some, English ‘matter’ is made out of mother: materia from mater.Footnote 72 Matter, then, as origin, as the feminized tie to the physical world; mother-matter is a point of departure. In Greek, as we have seen, ὕλη stands for both matter and forest simultaneously. But the question which this article has sought to open up is how near—or perhaps how far apart—these meanings of ὕλη come to each other. Can the forest, after hundreds of years of discussions of ὕλη as matter, be entirely unmarked by these discussions? And is it devoid of the ideological content which such philosophical discourses mobilize? At stake in questions such as these is also the vitality, or the vibrancy, of matter.Footnote 73 If matter can be thought in terms of the living forest (and not just the cut-down wood), what does that do to the idea of ‘raw’, inert, material? For further study, it would be useful to consider this opposite perspective, investigating what is left of the forest in the philosophical versions: what does Aristotle’s and later philosophers’ ὕλη owe to its woody origins?
For now, we have seen how the hopelessly intellectualizing landscape of Longus’ novel is shaded by another nuance, elaborating those constant concerns of the novel: art and nature, men and women, city and country. Maciver’s insight, that the woods at the margin of the pastoral have a central metaphorical role to play, has provided the starting point for considering ὕλη as philosophical, gendered ‘matter’. Thus the physical space of the ὕλη is presented as the origin of unknown sounds which are put through a process of signification, or is itself resignified and made into a marsh in the Syrinx-mime. So ὕλη becomes associated with the unknown and unsignified, which needs the active participation of art to make sense. Furthermore, the myths which in different ways respond or react to ὕλη reflect the gender division inherent in the history of this word, by which women are relegated to a position of materiality, with the potential to be shaped through masculinized τέχνη. This is a reading, then, which sees the philosophical interests as fundamentally linked to the text’s concern with gender and gendered hierarchies; the transformations in and around the ὕλη indicate a philosophical interest in materiality and τέχνη, but simultaneously reflect the gendered ideologies which underline this concept of matter.
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