An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author.Footnote 1 Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation.Footnote 2 Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access:Footnote 3 ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’Footnote 4 This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.Footnote 5
Morgan is in more difficult territory with Longus, in contrast to the narrative structures in Petronius, in that the external anonymous third-person narrator of the novel is more likely to have been identified as the voice of the author Longus himself by an ancient readership.Footnote 6 Yet, there are a number of passages in Daphnis and Chloe that seem to support Morgan's thesis, above all the digression on the swimming ox at the end of Book 1 (1.30.6).Footnote 7 Daphnis is rescued from the pirates’ kidnapping and, along with Dorkon's herd of cattle, swims back to shore. The narrator proceeds to relate that oxen are excellent swimmers, but for the fact that their hooves fall off when saturated with water. The obvious absurdity of the statement jars with the literary depth and precision of the rest of the novel and is the kernel of Morgan's thesis for a differentiation between the foolish, pseudo-scientific voice of the urban narrator and the mocking, superior author. As Morgan himself states: ‘From our narratological viewpoint we can see that the joke is on the narrator himself, whose ridiculous pedantry distances him from the author and the best reader of the novel.’Footnote 8
In this article I seek to refute Morgan's thesis by showing that his characterization of the narrator is not one which the text can uphold. I engage with some of the specific categories and most important passages drawn up by Morgan,Footnote 9 and shall show in every instance that the narrator is a knowing narrator fully aware of the levels of literary deftness which Longus so carefully deploys, and that, furthermore, we are encouraged to see this figure as the projected voice of Longus himself. I postpone discussion of the digression on the oxen from Book 1 until the last section of the article, to establish that the evidence, apart from that controversial passage, cannot substantiate a diminished characterization of Longus’ narrator.
THE PREFACE AND LITERARINESS
Morgan sets out four aspects concerning the narrator to prove the contrasting competence of this voice from that of the ‘hidden author’.Footnote 10 In summary, these are: 1. The ironic humour of the narrator is subject to a hidden ‘authorial’ form of ironic humour. 2. The narrator betrays a less thorough understanding of the story, in supplying material for the story without further subjective comment. 3. The narrator idealizes the countryside, something the story itself resists. 4. The urban narrator betrays hostility and superiority to the real inhabitants of the countryside. I shall broadly follow these categories, but in different order, by analysing the apparent tension between the true rustics of the story and the urban idealization in the voice of the narrator, before proceeding to a discussion of the varying degrees of textual depth of which the narrator is apparently ignorant. This article will finish with the contentious digression on the oxen.
Any analysis of the narrator must begin with the novel's preface. Longus is unique of the extant novelists in that the narrating voice of the preface is the same as that of the main narrative which succeeds it.Footnote 11 In the very opening of the preface we read of a sightseer, a hunter on a visit, who saw a beautiful sight, a painting, in a grove of the Nymphs (‘While hunting in Lesbos I saw in a grove of the Nymphs the most beautiful sight I have ever seen: a depiction of an image, a history of love’, Praef. 1).Footnote 12 This same ego-narrator becomes the largely anonymous un-intrusive narrator of the main narrative.Footnote 13 This persona is presumably a man of wealth and a city-dweller on a hunting trip (θηρῶν). The fame of the painting, owing to its outstanding skill, its erotic subject matter and its more pleasurable aspects, draws many foreigners, who come as both suppliants of the Nymphs and viewers of the image.Footnote 14 The narrator summarizes the content of the tableaux.Footnote 15 He then explains that, after seeking out an exegete, he laboured to produce four books, as an offering to Eros, the Nymphs and Pan, on the one hand, but also a ‘possession for pleasure’ (κτῆμα δὲ τερπνόν, an allusion to Thucydides’ ‘possession for ever’), which will heal the lovesick, assuage those hurt by love, remind the one who has experienced the power of love, and teach the one who has never loved.Footnote 16 No one will escape love as long as beauty exists and eyes see, he explains, before praying that the god grant sōphrosynē to ‘us’ as ‘we write of the things of others’.
The voice of this ego-narrator is a careful construction of sophistication underlining the literary and self-reflexive quality of narration. This is not a narrator who evinces aporetic unsophistication. It is argued that the narrator's summary of the painting's content as a series of scenes reflects his inability to represent the painting as narrative, and that what follows is a telling of the story instructed by a not particularly good understanding of its intricacies. To quote Morgan: ‘The narrator is not its controlling intelligence, but rather a not particularly good reader (of the painting) or narratee (of the exegete), reliant on a third party's exposition and driven by a potentially irrational desire, whose take on the story need be no more authoritative than any other reader's, on either the factual or the interpretative level.’Footnote 17 Morgan bases this conclusion primarily on the summary way in which he outlines the scenes on the pictures without connecting them, on the need for an exegete to unfold their meaning and on the simple style of the preface. The most important factor to militate against this view is the terms of reference in which the writing of the four books is set. The narrator (and it is emphasized as the narrator) is seized with a desire to replicate the picture in writing: ἰδόντα με καὶ θαυμάσαντα πόθος ἔσχεν ἀντιγράψαι τῇ γραφῇ. It has been long recognized that ἀντιγράψαι expresses rivalry and emulation, and that the narrator wishes to outdo the depiction of the image in his four-book literary creation.Footnote 18 It has been further asserted that this desire to emulate the painting is in keeping with a man of paideia who produces an epideixis of his ability to respond and surpass the things seen.Footnote 19 In Lucian's De domo 2, the narrator points to the difference between a man of culture and the uneducated man:Footnote 20 the latter is mute and cannot express a response to what he sees, whereas the former in taking pleasure in the sight attempts to respond with speech.Footnote 21 Lucian's narrator goes on to explain that a flourishing of words (λόγων ἐπίδειξιν) within the hall itself is the best form of praise (3). Similarly, the narrator in the preface takes pleasure in the image and is determined, because of the pleasure he receives from the images,Footnote 22 to respond as only an educated person should. What we find in the preface, then, is a narrator marked as the type of educated responder highlighted in Lucian's De domo, a man of sophisticated paideia who can rival in words the sights he sees.Footnote 23 We should assume, therefore, that not only in this preface but throughout the narrative of the four books this is an ideal pepaideumenos who demands from his readership the same level of paideia.Footnote 24
There are further indications within the preface of literary knowingness. The ego of this preface is paralleled by Philetas, the praeceptor amoris of Book 2, both a literary manifestation of the bucolic poet Philitas and a type of wise, author-figure come to elucidate Daphnis and Chloe.Footnote 25 He suddenly appears to Daphnis and Chloe,Footnote 26 and gives an extended speech on his experiences of Eros, whose name the young couple have not heard before. He begins by explaining that he has a garden which he built for himself once he had given up shepherding because of old age (2.3.3). The verb he uses for his labour is ἐξεπονησάμην (2.3.3), used elsewhere in the novel only in the preface, where the narrator tells us that he laboured to produce the four books: τέτταρας βίβλους ἐξεπονησάμην (praef. 3). The garden of Philetas and, by metonymy, the sophisticated literary creations of the founder of bucolic poetry are identified as paralleled with, or symbolic of, the four books ‘laboured forth’ by the ego of the preface.Footnote 27 The two voices in the first person are carefully intertwined.Footnote 28 The conceit is that the production of the four physical books we hold in our hands was realized by this preface's persona, just as the garden was physically constructed by the old man in Book 2—physical reality points to a historical author, and the voice of the preface is to be identified with this author. Philetas has rightly been identified as ‘acting as the author's mouthpiece’,Footnote 29 but only, following the same principle, if we allow for the same identification of the author in the voice of the preface's narrator. As Morgan himself discusses further: ‘The author makes Philetas and the narrator use the same form of the verb … respectively of their horticultural work and effort in producing the narrative: the effect is to make the garden and the text analogous.’Footnote 30 All of the learned authoritativeness of Philetas is assumed in this narrator, just as the text itself assumes the status of the literary associations of learning of the garden.Footnote 31 The parallel encourages no separation in the identity of the author from that of the narrator. This Longan narrator is an authorial Alexandrianesque Philetas/Philitas figure.Footnote 32
This interrelation between the narrator and Philetas helps to elucidate the apparent lack of specificity about subject matter in the preface. Morgan argues that the preface is ‘full of words of shallow approbation’ such as the repeated use of καλός either in the positive or in the superlative degree in the opening two sentences.Footnote 33 Furthermore, he claims that the narrator describes what he sees on the painting as a series of unspecific and unconnected ideas, something which ‘enacts his initial failure to construe it as a narrative, until an exegete instructs him’.Footnote 34 Yet, the narrator is aware that the readers have not encountered the story which follows in detail in the narrative of the four books, something the narrator states he has already completed (ἐξεπονησάμην).Footnote 35 He is surely encoding into the preface some typical novelistic themes, whereby the narrator gives mere hints as to what follows, and to an extent misdirects the reader by emphasizing pirates and foreign incursions, themes more prevalent in more typical Greek novels.Footnote 36 The narrator is careful not to give away the vital events of the later stages of the plot, and in fact does not even reflect the temporal sequence in which he relates the story in the main narrative.Footnote 37 He simply summarizes the whole as relating to Eros (πολλὰ ἄλλα καὶ πάντα ἐρωτικά).
The limited understanding of the narrator accounts for the necessity of an exegete, it has been argued. He is the narrator's ‘only source of information … the story that we begin to read after the prologue is essentially the narrator's retelling of that of the exegete’.Footnote 38 This is a view that fails to take into account the rivalrous creativity of the narrator, emblematized in ἀντιγράψαι. There is no obvious reason why the narrator would purposefully (and, therefore, simplistically) cause his plotting to mirror exactly the scenes on the picture, especially if the readers come to the story first through the preface before reading the rest of the novel.Footnote 39 The preface is subject to the same rhetorical strategizing as the main narrative,Footnote 40 in that it is artfully reconstructing the original putative gazing at the picture, not narrating-while-watching. The preface, moreover, is a discrete site in itself for programme and allusion,Footnote 41 a sort of mirror of literary practice and manual for understanding the rest of the novel.Footnote 42 It is here above all that we are to find self-reflexive artistry,Footnote 43 controlled by the ego who ‘worked out’ the four books. The reader is to dig deeply here to uncover the purpose and subtexts of the novel.
There are at least two levels of function embedded in the keyword erōtika (πολλὰ ἄλλα καὶ πάντα ἐρωτικά).Footnote 44 On the one hand, the adjective chimes with the preface's hints at the novel's potential for titillation, discovered in the narrator's pothos (praef. 3) which grips him as he gazes, and implied in the prayer for sōphrosynē as he engages to write of the things of others (praef. 4).Footnote 45 On the other hand, the adjective echoes the opening gambit of the preface: this painting he saw is a history of love (ἱστορίαν ἔρωτος), containing an adventure of love (τύχην ἐρωτικήν, praef. 1). The personified figure Eros plays a central role in the story of the novel.Footnote 46 He is highlighted as ineluctable in the penultimate sentence of the preface (praef. 4). He is described as playing an active role in the events of the couple's lives (1.11.1). He is the subject of Philetas’ instruction to Daphnis and Chloe at the beginning of Book 2 (2.3–6, the point at which the couple hear the name of the god for the first time) and is also the force which makes Philetas’ garden beautiful (διὰ τοῦτο καλὰ καὶ τὰ ἄνθη καὶ τὰ φυτά, 2.5).Footnote 47 At 2.26, Pan appears to the Methymnian captain in a dream demanding that the kidnapped Chloe be returned, stating that the maiden he had snatched from the shrine was one of whom Eros himself wished to make a mythos (παρθένον ἐξ ἧς Ἔρως μῦθον ποιῆσαι θέλει, 2.27). Eros is not only behind the beautification of the gardens but also responsible for the very subject of the novel itself.Footnote 48 The gardens become analogous with the subject and the plot of the novel, just as the narrator of the preface hints: everything is down to Eros, as πάντα ἐρωτικά should be translated, rather than a translation which restricts the sense of the adjective only to ‘amorous’ or even ‘sexy’, as Morgan, perhaps tendentiously, suggests.Footnote 49 The post factum writing of the preface by this narrator to introduce the pre-written four books of the novel necessitates returning to the preface to unpack the full implications of erōtika as connotative of a (meta-)literary spectrum that is larger than a mere promise of amorous adventures.Footnote 50 In fact, in the hierarchy of literary creation, this narrator is relegated beneath Eros himself, as Imbert has shown: ‘It is the God of Love who has caused the whole drama and arranged the succession of events as a revelation of his power.’Footnote 51
The complexity of the preface bespeaks an artful narrator who obfuscates and misdirects about the subject matter of the four books he has constructed, but who above all draws attention to the centrality of Eros and the educational nature of the novel. The other authorial character within the novel, Philetas, similarly teaches the young couple about Eros and introduces his name within a literary setting that is loaded with careful poetic and philosophical allusion. It is essential to correlate this bucolic, learned figure with the identity of the preface's narrator, and to read the rest of the novel with this characterization in mind.
THE URBAN PERSPECTIVE
The narrator of the novel, then, is a sophisticated, knowing reader who creates an emulous literary recasting of what he purportedly sees in the painted eikones.Footnote 52 This narrator seems to be an urban visitor (Praef. 1), and it has been argued that this persona idealizes the countryside and overlooks the realities of the rustic life ‘through sentimental fantasies of “noble simplicity” and “pastoral innocence”’, and expresses superiority to the lack of sophistication evident in the lives of the folk of the countryside.Footnote 53 This perspective is certainly evident in the figures of the young couple, who are idealized and do not reflect the rustic norm. They are mythological others, in the description and experience of whom plausibility and actuality are suspended as the reader imbibes the fantasy and suspends expectation of realistic representation. Daphnis and Chloe are divinely protected at birth and suckled by animals, something typical in myth for children of gods—as Daphnis himself points out at 1.16.3.Footnote 54 These are characters closer to the literary figures in the Idylls of Theocritus, a key source for Longus,Footnote 55 in that they ‘belong to no world we can identify outside the poems in which they appear’.Footnote 56
Daphnis and Chloe, then, represent the literary bucolic world received from Theocritus (and Philitas) with all of the sophistication one would expect from a novel which is imbued with advertisement of paideia. It should come as no surprise that this narrator describes an idealized version of the countryside, given how carefully he is constructed as a pepaideumenos appealing to the similarly constructed paideia of his readers. The close alignment of the narrator with Philetas extends to the description of their idealized places of visitation: the grove of the preface, and the garden favoured by Eros in Book 2. The privileging of aesthetic ‘prettiness’ over rustic realities is emblematized by Philetas’ garden and indeed the novel's preface. These are literary, conceited constructs, metaphors of literary creativity constructed within settings that attempt to bear no semblance to the rigours of actual rural life.Footnote 57 The literary is foregrounded before the realities of actual rural life, as Morgan rightly argues,Footnote 58 but only because the literary (for which read above all ‘bucolic’) aims of the novel predominate among other narrative emphases derived from other genres such as New Comedy.Footnote 59
The realities of rustic life which seep through to the surface of the text from time to time, alongside the stock comic aspects, are to be read as part of the literary-bucolic texture in synthesis. We laugh with the narrator at the naivety exhibited in some of the episodes,Footnote 60 just as we take pleasure in our superior paideia mirrored in that of the narrator, but the fact that the city folk are sometimes ironized too does not mean that this has to be at the expense of this urban narrator. Morgan identifies two strands as separated out focalizations by two different voices. For him, the (hidden) author undermines his narrator's mockery of the rustics on a number of occasions, in keeping with his overall view that the novel's ‘own artificiality and its ironic play with the literary conventions by which it is configured belong at the level of the author and are at the expense of the narrator’.Footnote 61 In what follows, I shall first discuss some aspects of the representation of the countryside through the varying focalization which the novel provides, and then the extent to which this urban narrator should be paralleled with the other urban characters. In the next section I discuss some of the key instances raised by Morgan about the apparent naivety of the narrator, with particular attention paid to the tension within the ‘urban’ and the ‘rustic’ interplay.
By Book 4 the city people who have entered the story give an indication of their unfeigned superiority to the rustics they meet. 4.20.2 contains a particularly programmatic statement. Dionysophanes, the man who turns out to be Daphnis’ aristocratic urban father, on hearing Lamon tell the story of how he found Daphnis, begins to believe what he has heard, because such a fantastic tale would be beyond a rustic's invention: ‘πῶς δ᾽ ἂν καὶ ταῦτα ἔπλασεν ἄγροικος;’ (‘how on earth could a rustic invent such things?’) he says to himself. In Longus, πλάττω is used only here and in the immediate context, at 4.20.1,Footnote 62 where Dionysophanes is reported as telling Lamon to speak only the truth and not to invent things that have the semblance of mythoi (μηδὲ ὅμοια πλάττειν μύθοις).Footnote 63 Dionysophanes implies that his view of the rustic world is an idealized one, on the one hand, whereby it is the locus for literary invention, as read in, for example, Theocritus, but at the same time mythoi of quality belong only to educated figures and not to someone such as Lamon, who inhabits a world wherein the uneducated rustics cannot shape sophisticated mythoi.Footnote 64 It is no accident that his collocation for truth as an antithesis to mythos recalls a similar reaction from Daphnis and Chloe on hearing about Eros for the first time from Philetas (μῦθον οὐ λόγον, 2.7.1). Paideia is requisite for invention and is assumed to be beyond Lamon.Footnote 65
Longus here encodes what is represented throughout the novel, something that is apparent too in the primary narrator's discourse,Footnote 66 namely a gulf in sophistication between those who have experience and above all paideia and those who do not. For example, at 3.15.1 Lykainion is more refined than is typical of the countryside (ἀγροικίας ἁβρότερον) and is therefore able both to instruct Daphnis and to take advantage of his naivety, because of her experience. Yet, this is not a simple urban vs rustic snobbery. Urban superiority over the countryside is something the rustics themselves acknowledge and of which they take advantage. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes the lengths taken by the foster parents to give Daphnis and Chloe a better upbringing than would be normal for mere rustics. As the children grow, their beauty appears to their foster parents as something greater than the country-norm (κάλλος αὐτοῖς ἐνεφαίνετο κρεῖττον ἀγροικίας, 1.7.1). The focalization is that of the rustics, not of the narrator specifically,Footnote 67 and they go on themselves to foreshadow the narrator's comment about Lykainion's non-rustic refinement (ἀγροικίας ἁβρότερον) by insisting that their fosterlings receive a more sophisticated education, even literacy and only the pleasurable aspects of the countryside (τροφαῖς ἁβροτέραις ἔτρεφον καὶ γράμματα ἐπαίδευον καὶ πάντα ὅσα καλὰ ἦν ἐπ’ ἀγροικίας, 1.8.1).Footnote 68 It is altogether clear that Dryas and Lamon have not only realized that there is something mystically providential about the survival of these children, but more specifically their superior birth-status, identified in their exceptional beauty and in the expensive items found along with the abandoned children (τύχην ἐκ σπαργάνων ἐπαγγελλόμενοι κρείττονα, 1.8.1), is an opportunity for financial gain.Footnote 69 By giving Daphnis and Chloe an education and in keeping them for the fairer things of the countryside as opposed to its harsh realities, Dryas and Lamon are fostering the class separation themselves.Footnote 70 Daphnis and Chloe are on a path of paideia by nature and by nurture, and this is something the novel insists on emphasizing.Footnote 71 The first inset narrative, the aetiology of the wood-pigeon (phatta) told by Daphnis himself to Chloe, symbolizes the two-fold emphases the foster-parents give the pair.Footnote 72 Daphnis is able to put his education to use, and the pleasure they take in the sound of the wood-pigeon reflects the time they are given to enjoy it (πάντα ὅσα καλὰ ἦν ἐπ’ ἀγροικίας, 1.8.1). The introductory words at 1.27.1 illustrate this higher (that is, literary) level of engagement with the world around them:
ἔτερψεν αὐτούς ποτε φάττα βουκολικὸν ἐκ τῆς ὕλης φθεγξαμένη. καὶ τῆς Χλόης ζητούσης μαθεῖν ὅ τι λέγει, διδάσκει αὐτὴν ὁ Δάφνις μυθολογῶν τὰ θρυλούμενα.
A wood-pigeon calling from the woods in a bucolic way gave them pleasure. And on Chloe's desire to learn what the birdsong meant, Daphnis taught her, mythologizing the bird's cooing.Footnote 73
The narrator is framing the discourse and enquiry of Daphnis and Chloe in the very terms of the preface. This is a mirroring of the reader-response of the external recipients of the rustic literariness. Daphnis and Chloe are participants in our own readerly experience, and it is often through them that we are encouraged to partake in the layers of meaning and intertextuality available. They idealize as much as the narrator. The phatta is described as sounding forth boukolikon, an adjective usually a designator of bucolic song or poetry (as found in Theoc. 1 in the refrain beginning at line 64: βουκολικᾶς ἀοιδᾶς). The bucolic song gives pleasure to the hearers (ἔτερψεν αὐτούς—compare the emphasis on to terpnon at praef. 3 and at 2.7.1). Daphnis responds with his own epideictic telling of what were mere sounds from the bird, that is, he puts a literary enhancement on ta thryloumena.Footnote 74
Reading idealization through both rustic and urban participants realigns responsibility to a great extent away from the sole focalization of the primary narrator. Daphnis is a literary exponent himself, able to construct set-piece manifestations of his own paideia.Footnote 75 In this sense Daphnis is like Philetas in his ability to construct pleasurable mythological narrative.Footnote 76 Daphnis’ ability to extemporize is put to the test in Book 2 in his encounter with the rich young Methymnians who accuse him of theft (he has had practice in extemporization in his war of words with Dorkon at 1.16). Daphnis’ superiority to the Methymnians is underscored by the narrator, who is clearly on his protagonist's side. Philetas is the adjudicator of the trial and finds in Daphnis’ favour (2.17.1). The rustics are then described as triumphing in a mock-epic engagement which results in the Methymnians being put to flight.Footnote 77 The reader is left in no doubt that the Methymnians are unfavourably characterized by the narrator and that Daphnis is the superior debater,Footnote 78 a fact which problematizes the scholarly view that Longus undermines his narrator by paralleling his characterization with that of the Methymnians. As underlined above, the only indication of the narrator's background is that he describes himself as hunting in Lesbos (the novel's first three words, ἐν Λέσβῳ θηρῶν). It is plausible to presume that he is a man of wealth, an urban visitor to the countryside on a hunting trip. The Methymnians are rich, urban young men seeking pleasurable, exotic rustic pursuits (ἐν ξενικῇ τέρψει, 2.12.1), and Dionysophanes’ son Astylus is described in similar terms (4.11.1).Footnote 79 The assumption has been made that the snobbery of these visitors from the city matches that of the narrator, and that the novel plays on the contrast between their idealized expectations of the countryside and its actual realities. Both sets of characters, the Methymnians and the urbanites of Book 4, have rightly been identified as constructs from New Comedy who infiltrate the bucolic (in a literary sense) world.Footnote 80 These intruders’ characterization is undermined within the narrative, but I submit that it is the narrator himself who propounds this representation.
The pleasure-seeking Methymnians engage in country pursuits expected by rich visitors (2.12), but encounter rustic realities when their ship's cable is stolen (2.13.1). They make little fuss and replace it with a rope made of willow-shoots (2.13.3), which is eventually eaten by goats (2.13.4). They blame Daphnis and, as discussed above, end up in a trial to decide the issue. The Methymnians’ assumed superiority is illustrated by their perceived need to speak clearly and succinctly because (so they thought) it was only a cowherd who was the judge (βουκόλον ἔχοντες δικαστήν, 2.15.1). Their misjudgement is proved by their defeat and physical expulsion at the hands of the rustics, and the mockery is complete. That the narrator himself knowingly undermines city-folk is given further weight in a passage towards the end of the novel, at the wedding of Daphnis and Chloe (4.38.4):Footnote 81
ἐνέμοντο δὲ καὶ αἱ αἶγες πλησίον, ὥσπερ καὶ αὐταὶ κοινωνοῦσαι τῆς ἑορτῆς. τοῦτο τοῖς μὲν ἀστυκοῖς οὐ πάνυ τερπνὸν ἦν⋅
And the goats were also grazing nearby, as though they too were joining in the festivities. This was not at all to the liking of the townsfolk.
The idealized pleasure of the countryside is undermined by the presence of the goats and presumably their smell. The insistent artificiality of the countryside played out throughout the novel is constructed by the actual rustics themselves. For example, they ensure that the garden of Dionysophanes is suitably prettified, with the dung and muck removed, before his arrival.Footnote 82 Now and again, however, the reality comes to the surface, as in the case of these goats. Note the humour implied in the contrast between astykois and terpnon: this is a joke at the expense of the urbanites’ snobbery,Footnote 83 dealt out by the narrator himself. The disdain of the narrator for the superficial arrivals from the city is clear, just as he implies that the Methymnians were wrong to underestimate not only the judgement of Philetas and his paideia but also the ability of the country folk to overcome them in ‘battle’. It is, therefore, misguided to assimilate the competence and person of the narrator with the young men from Methymna. This narrator is just as prone to ironize the portrayal of the urban visitors as he is prone to ironize the actual rustics or Daphnis and Chloe themselves. It is vital to identify all characters as open to the same treatment by the same narrator. Yet, arguably, the world of the city comes off the worse in the end. The mixing of two generic strands, the bucolic and the comic/novelistic, throughout the novel comes to a head in Book 4, whereby tropes and characters from New Comedy seem to overwhelm a bucolic world threatened only rarely by foreign incursions. At the end of Book 4, however, Daphnis and Chloe decide to reject the city for the countryside (4.37.1—they cannot bear life in the city), and to bring up their children there.Footnote 84 The countryside (albeit the idealized, literary version) in the end triumphs.Footnote 85
TEXTUAL DEPTH
I turn now to discuss the most important examples set forth as evidence that Longus’ narrator has a shallow understanding of matters, literary, intertextual and otherwise, contained in the novel.Footnote 86 In accordance with the line of argumentation that ‘the author's narratee is led to see that the narrator does not fully “know” his story’,Footnote 87 Morgan argues that the narrator's knowledge of the divine plane is specifically limited by the author, in that the narrator acknowledges their presence and function only when they appear to the characters within the story, a phenomenon which is restricted for the most part to dreams.Footnote 88 This ‘reticence about the action of the gods’ is in contrast to the freedom with which characters relate the presence and even emotions of the gods in the inset tales.Footnote 89
I begin with Eros. As discussed already, the god is given a central role in the fabrication of the story. At 2.27, Pan appears in a dream to the Methymnian captain (he and his crew have abducted Chloe) and orders him to release their captive, a parthenos of whom Eros wishes to make a mythos (2.27.1). Before the vision, supernatural events occur which cause chaos. The whole episode is narrated, Morgan argues, exactly as it was seen by those involved—the narrator, therefore, is afforded no more knowledge than the participants themselves.Footnote 90 What is emphasized is the seeming-ness of the sights (2.25.3–4): the whole land seemed (ἐδόκει) to be ablaze with fire, confused shouts and sounds arise, someone seemed to be wounded (τετρῶσθαί τις ἐδόκει) and another lay on the ground mimicking a corpse (ἔκειτο νεκροῦ μιμούμενος). To an onlooker a night-battle seemed to be ensuing, only one without any enemies present (εἴκασεν ἄν τις ὁρᾶν νυκτομαχίαν οὐ παρόντων πολεμίων). Morgan states: ‘The supernatural events of the intervention itself are carefully relegated to the realm of appearances.’Footnote 91 Yet, this is standard practice in description of experience because of Dionysiac manifestation, evident as early as Euripides’ Bacchae:Footnote 92 at lines 918–21 Pentheus describes what he appears to be seeing (δοκῶ … δοκεῖς)—two suns, two Thebes, the stranger (Dionysus) as a bull. It is a vision which occurs only to those under the influence of Dionysus—the most tragic example being Pentheus’ mistaken identity in the eyes of his mother. Morgan has assigned to the narrator's ignorance what is entirely expected in the conventions of describing Dionysiac events.Footnote 93
Morgan makes a similar argument about the scene immediately preceding these events, where the Nymphs appear to Daphnis, and relate to him the care they have taken and continue to take of Chloe. He states: ‘The narrator's knowledge of the Nymphs’ state of mind is limited to what a human observer could infer from their appearance.’Footnote 94 It is true that the Nymphs intrude into the novel only in the realm of dreams, and that we receive their information not directly from the narrator but in secondary narration; however, this is typical of the Greek novel generally. Divine visitations to mortals happen most frequently through dreams, and it is therefore through the mortal character's perspective that we understand the vision.Footnote 95 This is the case with Daphnis: the focalization through his eyes (it is emphasized that they appeared to him—καὶ αὐτῷ αἱ τρεῖς ἐφίστανται, 2.23.1) accounts for the fact that they are described as looking like the statues (τοῖς ἀγάλμασιν ὅμοιαι). Dryas and Lamon think that very thing in their dream at 1.7.2 (τὰς Νύμφας ἐδόκουν ἐκείνας τὰς ἐν τῷ ἄντρῳ), wherein those statues, now animated, hand over their adopted children to Eros. Longus is merely engaging in a novelistic trope.
That this narrator has fully omniscient knowledge of the divine plane within the novel is unambiguously on display in an important passage early in Book 1: τοιαῦτα δὲ αὐτῶν παιζόντων τοιάνδε σπουδὴν Ἔρως ἀνέπλασε (‘While such things kept their playful attention, Eros plotted the following piece of seriousness’). The playful beginnings of Daphnis and Chloe's life together are complicated by the intervention of Eros himself. Morgan relegates discussion of this sentence to a footnote and argues that it is merely a metaphor on the part of the narrator which the author's narratee reads as a literal truth. Taken on its own, however, following on from the vision of Dryas and Lamon who see a winged figure but do not recognize the god (1.7.2), this passage indicates not only the superior knowledge of narrator and reader but also, more importantly, the full awareness of this narrator of Eros’ own role in the formation of the plot. The verb used, ἀνέπλασε, underscores the fact that this is the personified Eros shaping the story, not a broad metaphor for love. As discussed above with reference to Dionysophanes, the verb, here with prefix, signifies literary creation, an ability to mythologize and shape a plot. σπουδή itself has a literary register beyond its primary meaning of seriousness of circumstance.Footnote 96 A personified, active and authorial role for Eros in the construction of the events of the plot could not be more lucidly described by the narrator, and exemplifies the latter's full cognition of the role the divine plays in the story he narrates; this is a full disclosure of direct knowledge.Footnote 97
Longus’ novel is often described as untypical in that it downplays typical motifs associated with the genre.Footnote 98 A hint of the work's self-reflexive awareness of this difference is found at 1.31.1, the point at which Daphnis escapes piracy and shipwreck.
ἐκσῴζεται μὲν δὴ τὸν τρόπον τοῦτον ὁ Δάφνις, δύο κινδύνους παρ’ ἐλπίδα πᾶσαν διαφυγών, λῃστηρίου καὶ ναυαγίου.
After this manner, then, was Daphnis saved, and escaped two kinds of danger—against all expectation—piracy and shipwreck.
Escape from such dangers belongs to the very fabric of the Greek novel, and to any experienced reader of such texts these would not come as unexpected events. Morgan reads this surprise at Daphnis’ escape as belonging to the narrator who apparently lacks the knowingness of the author/author's narratee, and claims that the narrator ‘buys into the stereotypes at face value’.Footnote 99 Yet, the novel's ‘deconstructive play with generic conventions’, as Morgan cogently puts it,Footnote 100 surely comes not at the expense of the narrator but rather at the expense of Daphnis. The latter is the subject of the main verb and therefore of the participle, and the syntax leads us to see παρ’ ἐλπίδα as relating to Daphnis himself. The narrator is playing with Daphnis’ lack of experience and unawareness that he is part of a larger literary scheme with precedents and standard templates. A comparable example of the narrator's play with Daphnis’ naivety is found at 1.8.3, where the young pair are described as rejoicing in their herding roles, in their eyes ‘a great office’ (ὡς ἀρχὴν μεγάλην),Footnote 101 without truly realizing just how accurate their perception of the office is. Their perspective contrasts with that of their foster-parents, who had sought a role for them superior to their own. Daphnis and Chloe are set apart from the other rustics as belonging to an idealized mythical world (watched over and administered by Eros—2.7.2), where this function they receive puts them on the same path as Eros the Shepherd, to whom they themselves erect an altar (4.39.2). What would ordinarily be perceived as a mundane task has far higher connotations in this novel, given Eros’ oversight (1.7.2).
At the end of the preface the narrator prays for sōphrosynē in his writing of the things of others (ἡμῖν δὲ ὁ θεὸς παράσχοι σωφρονοῦσι τὰ τῶν ἄλλων γράφειν, praef. 4). The reader's expectation is therefore aroused to the possibility of erotic detail which could verge on the explicit, especially given the subject of the preface.Footnote 102 At the points in the novel where explicitness might be expected, the narrator tends to revert to euphemism, thus disappointing any titillation-seeking narratee. This is especially evident in three places: the point in Book 1 at which Daphnis falls in love with Chloe (1.14–15), Daphnis’ encounter with Lykainion (3.18) and the final section of the novel, the wedding night (4.40). The first two instances have been applied in Morgan's thesis to argue that this narrator has a less than insightful awareness of some of the events of the story. After Chloe's rescue of Daphnis from the wolf-pit by use of her unrolled breast-band (1.12.1), the cowherd Dorkon, who was on hand to help, brings to bear his full attention on Chloe. It is nowhere stated explicitly that Dorkon, as is apt for his name,Footnote 103 caught sight of the bare-breasted Chloe and for that reason amorously pursued her, but that is certainly the indubitable implication of 1.15.1:
Δόρκων δὲ ὁ βουκόλος, ὁ τὸν Δάφνιν ἐκ τοῦ σιροῦ καὶ τὸν τράγον ἀνιμησάμενος, ἀρτιγένειος μειρακίσκος καὶ εἰδὼς ἔρωτος καὶ τὰ ἔργα καὶ τὰ ὀνόματα εὐθὺς μὲν ἐπ’ ἐκείνης τῆς ἡμέρας ἐρωτικῶς τῆς Χλόης διετέθη.
The cowherd Dorkon, who had drawn Daphnis and the goat out of the pit, a young lad with his first beard already showing, who knew both the ways and the names of Eros, immediately from that very day had erotic feelings towards Chloe.
‘The narrator says no more, either from obtuseness or from the sophrosyne for which he prayed in the prologue, but the author's reader can easily infer that Dorkon's glimpse of Chloe's innocently bared breasts was instrumental in his infatuation. Even his name tips the wink to the author's reader behind the narrator's back.’Footnote 104 It is indeed left to the reader's discernment to read between the lines, as it were, but the details given make it very obvious why Dorkon was suddenly so interested. This is someone who has sexual experience, and it could not be emphasized more that it was immediately, from that very day, that he was so interested.Footnote 105 While no overt connection is made between cause and effect, the description of the readiness and experience of Dorkon as well as the repetition of the fact of his rescue of Daphnis (ὁ τὸν Δάφνιν ἐκ τοῦ σιροῦ) to remind the reader of the breast-band are so obviously suggestive that the narrator must himself be party to the layered game he embeds in his own narration. The narrator's prayer in the preface for such self-control in itself implies awareness of the full gambit of narratorial possibilities in writing of the things of others.Footnote 106 Ignorant he is not.
At 3.18 Daphnis receives his erotic paidagōgia from Lykainion. The rusticity and naivety of Daphnis is emphasized here by the narrator perhaps more than anywhere else.Footnote 107 This is the very point of ignorance that brought him such grief (specifically aporia—3.14.5), and his eagerness to be taught is satirized by the narrator as belonging to his rustic unsophistication (3.18.1–2):
οὐκ ἐκαρτέρησεν ὁ Δάφνις ὑφ’ ἡδονῆς, ἀλλ’ ἅτε ἄγροικος καὶ αἰπόλος καὶ ἐρῶν καὶ νέος, πρὸ τῶν ποδῶν καταπεσὼν τὴν Λυκαίνιον ἱκέτευεν ὅτι τάχιστα διδάξαι τὴν τέχνην, δι’ ἧς ὃ βούλεται δράσει Χλόην⋅ καὶ ὥσπερ τι μέγα καὶ θεόπεμπτον ἀληθῶς μέλλων διδάσκεσθαι καὶ ἔριφον αὐτῇ σηκίτην δώσειν ἐπηγγείλατο καὶ τυροὺς ἁπαλοὺς πρωτορρύτου γάλακτος καὶ τὴν αἶγα αὐτήν.
Daphnis could not control himself for pleasure, but inasmuch as he was a goatherd and in love and young, he fell before Lykainion's feet and begged her to teach him as quickly as possible the skill with which he could do to Chloe what he wanted. And as though he were about to be taught something great and truly heaven-sent he promised to give her a weaned goat and soft cheeses made from the rich milk and the she-goat herself.
Once the deed is performed, he is desperate to rush off and teach Chloe, given, as the narrator tells us, he still had a rustic outlook (ἔτι ποιμενικὴν γνώμην, 3.19.1). Rustic unsophistication is emphasized too by ἅτε ἄγροικος καὶ αἰπόλος (3.18.1), though not necessarily in a pejorative way, given its collocation with καὶ ἐρῶν καὶ νέος—we both smile at and pity Daphnis. The knowing superiority of both narrator and reader is brought to the fore as we witness the impossible naivety of Daphnis. Even the opening words of the excerpt above (οὐκ ἐκαρτέρησεν ὁ Δάφνις ὑφ’ ἡδονῆς), which on one level describe the joy of Daphnis, imply a different pleasure (ἡδονή) which he cannot contain and he will shortly experience. Morgan draws attention to the Platonic idea behind the words ὥσπερ τι μέγα καὶ θεόπεμπτον ἀληθῶς μέλλων διδάσκεσθαι that ‘Love truly is heavenly, both in this story and at large, and that what Daphnis is about to learn is the human aspect of the entire benevolent dispensation of Eros as outlined by Philetas’.Footnote 108 This is an allusion behind the narrator's back, according to Morgan.Footnote 109 The Lykainion episode brings into focus the two competing strands of the novel. On a human, realistic level, the quest of Daphnis and Chloe is laughable, and Daphnis’ naivety before Lykainion impossible. But on the mythical bucolic-literary level, where realism is suspended, Daphnis is being guided by the gods, and Lykainion is truly a heaven-sent instructor to direct him. The Platonic allusion points to the Socratic-like instruction he now receives given the previous emphasis on his aporia and lack of knowledge (3.14.5). We have already seen that the narrator promotes and idealizes the mythological over the real, and the bucolic over the New Comic/novelistic, and we should read here two layers of meaning put out by the narrator in full realization of these levels: the joke at Daphnis’ expense, whereby we read from a position of reality, along with the narrator, and the promotion of the literary mainframe of the novel, whereby the unreal ‘other’ plays out to a conclusion.
It is unnecessary to see such layering as beyond the competence of the narrator. The two coexisting strands of the literal and the literary can be found at either end of the Lykainion episode. She gains Daphnis’ attention by pretending that an eagle had snatched away one of her twenty geese, only for that goose to be dropped deep in the woods (3.16.2). This ploy has a broader literary significance, in that Penelope dreamed of twenty geese (the suitors) who were killed by an eagle (Odysseus) at Od. 19.535–50: the promiscuous courtesan-figure from New Comedy is framed in reference which recalls the most chaste of all women.Footnote 110 Lykainion's parting words to Daphnis are put in terms which evoke another famous female figure from the Odyssey. She says: καὶ μέμνησο ὅτι σε ἄνδρα ἐγὼ πρὸ Χλόης πεποίηκα (‘And remember that I made you a man before Chloe did’, 3.19.3). At the level of the plot's development, this is an entirely serious and accurate statement: Daphnis now knows the erga of Eros because Lykainion was the first to have sex with him, before Chloe. Yet, there is another Odyssean allusion here: at Od. 8.461–2, Nausicaa's final words to Odysseus are very similarly constructed:
Nausicaa, the archetypal parthenos ready for marriage, is (perhaps comically) a figure for Lykainion's parting words to Daphnis. Both have done a service to their respective addressees, but with very differing physical interactions. Nausicaa is the young woman whom Odysseus flattered to get into the city, but with whom he carefully avoided any further involvement to ensure he got home to Penelope, a framework of experience the reverse of the roles of Daphnis the inexperienced and Lykainion the praeceptor amoris.
There is nothing to be gained from arguing that this intertextual layering is at an ignorant narrator's expense, but is rather in keeping with the comic tone of the narration of the Lykainion episode as a whole.Footnote 111 As argued on the basis of the narrator's self-characterization in the preface, the learning implied as embedded within the novel, as something Hellenistic and ‘laboured forth’ (ἐξεπονησάμην, praef. 3), is altogether to be expected of this narrator.
ENDING ON THE HOOF
νήχεται δὲ ἄρα βοῦς ὅσον οὐδὲ ἄνθρωπος⋅ μόνων λείπεται τῶν ἐνύδρων ὀρνίθων καὶ αὖ τῶν ἰχθύων⋅ οὐδ’ ἂν ἀπόλοιτο βοῦς νηχόμενος, εἰ μὴ τῶν χηλῶν οἱ ὄνυχες περιπέσοιεν διάβροχοι γενόμενοι. μαρτυροῦσι τῷ λόγῳ μέχρι νῦν πολλοὶ τόποι τῆς θαλάσσης, βοὸς πόροι λεγόμενοι.
An ox swims better even than a human. Only waterfowl and of course fish are superior. An ox would not perish swimming if it were not for the fact that their hoof-ends fall off when they become wet. Witness to this account are the many maritime places which to this day are called ‘Bosporos’.
There is no easy solution to account for the absurd digression on oxen at 1.30.4. This article has attempted to demonstrate that the primary narrator of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is an erudite, careful and artful character. There is nothing in the novel which suggests anything otherwise, except for this digression. The information in this excerpt bespeaks a laughably ignorant, foolish pedant. This passage is the cornerstone of Morgan's separation of author from less sophisticated narrator:Footnote 112 ‘The absurdity of this has dismayed scholars, and even led to a proposal to delete the whole passage as a copyist's addition. However, there is no good reason to do so, and from our narratological viewpoint we can see that the joke is on the narrator himself, whose ridiculous pedantry distances him from the author and the best reader of the novel. Other discursive intrusions by the narrator lack the obvious irony of this one, but nevertheless position him as an eager purveyor of erudite detail from an urban perspective.’Footnote 113
If we put Morgan's approach to the side, as I think we should, then either this passage is an interpolation, or the passage illustrates a narrator parodying, ironically, pseudo-scientific digressions common in the prose literature of the Early Empire. The passage is marked as an interpolation in Dalmeyda's 1934 Budé edition (following Castiglioni) but the communis opinio is that the text is indeed of Longus, defended above all by Reeve in his Teubner edition, who states that it reeks of Longus (‘Longum sapit’).Footnote 114 The language does indeed suggest Longus: if it were an interpolation it must have been by a very careful and early imitator of the novelist. If anything could lend weight to the idea of interpolation here, it would surely be the temporal marker μέχρι νῦν (which occurs only here in Longus), drawing the reader's attention to the moment of composition, in a novel which altogether avoids indication of its date.Footnote 115 This is very much out of keeping with the rest of the text. The temporal marker does, however, at the same time, point to a narrator who marks his own temporal existence outside of the novel, as he steps back from the fictional unreality momentarily. This intrusion points to a voice of an authorial reality, who physically produced the four books (praef. 3), and wrote them (γράφειν, praef. 4). It would be odd for a so-called hidden author to present the narrator in such authorial terms of physical reality only to undermine him.
The alternative solution is to read parody here of pseudo-scientific writings, most likely contemporary. In his newly published commentary on Daphnis and Chloe, Ewen Bowie settles for this explanation.Footnote 116 For him, Longus is mocking novelists such as Achilles Tatius and other contemporary authors for their fondness for such digressions. The reader is to see the nonsensical inaccuracy about the results of oxen that swim as just that, nonsense inserted for amusement. Contemporary readers would be very used to reading ‘scientific’ asides in other prose works. The irony at work here is targeted at authors of other texts and is not at this narrator's expense. The narrator relates Lykainion's education of Daphnis ‘with a straight face’, as it were; he is similarly straight-faced as he relates this seeming aetiology of Bosporos. This line of argumentation is at least plausible and would be worthy of an author who so carefully creates an alternative novel, one which plays with the conventions so forcefully. Yet, there is no other passage in Longus which so openly displays such a facile pose, if only to engage in literary parody. The passage is unique in Longus, for that reason.
In his apparatus criticus, Reeve writes ‘utinam recte’ of Castiglioni's argument for interpolation. It would indeed be the easiest way to deal with a most unusual passage. Bowie's explanation is surely the only realistic one, however. What must be denied is an interpretation that wants to separate a naive, foolish narrator from a mocking author. The evidence in the rest of the novel points to a very different type of narrator, and this digression must be approached from that standpoint.
