Two Brief Notes on Daphnis and Chloe

I quote from Moses Hadas’ translation in the old Doubleday Anchor paperback Three Greek Romances with its charming cover by Diana Klemin.

     Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is the most popular of the Hellenistic romances and, in the opinion of many, the finest. The story, translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1559, inititated a revival of the pastoral romance genre, influencing Honoré d'Urfé, Torquato Tasso, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In more recent times the work inspired paintings by Boucher in the 18th century, Gleyre in the 19th century, illustrations by Klimt and lithographs by Chagall in the 20th, as well as an opera by Offenbach and a ballet by Ravel.
     This interest and my own is founded on the narrative’s presentation of the powers of love. Under the mythological symbols of Eros, Pan, and the Nymphs, the intensity of human sexuality, what D. H. Lawrence much closer to our own age would have called its divinity, is presented with power and subtlety. Similar to the Pervigilium Veneris in its wonderful belated passion, the story is perhaps primarily a paean to life conceived as the reproductive power of nature. Yet at the same time as he recognizes the glorious but undifferentiated song of the creation’s renewal, the writer never slights the human element, with its burden of free will and an almost modern share of self-consciousness and self-contradiction.

1.
     The opening ekphrasis of a work of art supposedly displayed in the Lesbos grove of the Nymphs, a place itself of surpassing beauty, full of tree and flowers and watered by a fructifying stream. There, the author relates, he saw “fairest sight” he had ever seen, not the landscape but rather “the painted picture of a tale of love.” He claims that “an interpreter of the picture” detailed its story to him which he then set down. Thus, in a way, the supposed painting is an illustration of his narration; while in another his story is a partial depiction from a very human perspective, of the élan vital observable throughout the biological world.
     For the picture includes much more than a highly distilled version of the courtship of Daphnis and Chloe in its depiction of “young lovers pledging to one another.” The first image is of women in childbed and others tending infants, not ordinarily considered erotic situations, though they are rapidly enfolded in a grander scheme of fertility as sheep and shepherd are introduced until it is not entirely clear who is tending whom. All are united in a coherent mutually invigorating and passionately warm net of relationships.
     In front of the backdrop, though, in the human realm, one sees not only the lovers, but also “pirates” and “invaders.” These in fact are mentioned immediately before Longus assures the reader, “all these scenes spoke of love.” Intruders who impede the course of love are comparable to Catullus’ grumbling old men or the lauzengiers and gilos who out of jealousy or malice present obstacles to the troubadour’s affairs. Without conflict there can be no drama and therefore, from Greek New Comedy times through the most recent Hollywood romantic comedy, some force must separate the man and woman. When they overcome and can join together, the happy ending has arrived.
     Yet the figure of a pirate has a further significance in Longus. At the close of Book I Daphnis suffers the prolonged frustration of having admired Chloe’s naked body yet still not having sex with her. Far from a generalized Ovidian lovesickness, Daphnis is simply experiencing intrusively urgent sexual desire. He considers this state of suffering to be worse than the ordeal of his capture by pirates. “His soul,” one reads, “was still tarrying with the pirates,” who alarm him less than his beautiful beloved “for he was young, and a rustic, and so far ignorant of the piratical ways of love.”
     This final phrase, unique in the book, suggests not that he is dwelling on his adventure among the pirates, but rather that his experience of being on love is similar, that love is necessarily in some way piratical, which is to say selfish and domineering. The idea may seem out of place in a love story in which the leading characters are both impossibly naïve. Both are portrayed as child-like in their innocence and thus “pure” in their love. The primary view of love in Daphnis and Chloe is extravagantly unselfish; Daphnis, after all, recoils from initiating sexual intercourse for fear of hurting Chloe. Nature stands in the background, with its undoubtedly necessary, beautiful, and “right” drive to reproduce. This small dark grace note tempers the celebration of love, reminding readers that passion can make one miserable as well as elated and suggesting the many love relations which are less ideally mutual than Daphnis and Chloe’s in which one partner (or both) actually seeks to govern the other.
     The pirates in the story thus represent both the impediments love often encounters as well as the potential within love for a selfish desire to possess.

2.
     Only a few pages short of the end of Book I (1.30.6) is a scene in which Daphnis crosses a stream while escaping his pursuers. Not only are the pirates weighed down by their armor; Daphnis hitches a ride as “securely as if he were riding in a wagon” by seizing the horns of two cows heading across. This fanciful image is vivid and memorable in itself, but it also serves to introduce an odd digression.
     The author relates by the way as an interesting fact that cattle can swim better than people, but then in place of returning to his story, he continues to elaborate the point, conceding that waterfowl are even more at ease in the water and adding a second exception -- “and, of course, fish” – as though he were being scrupulous about facts in a natural history treatise. Not willing to drop the theme even at that, he notes that “an ox is never in danger of drowning, unless his hoofs become softened in the water and drop off.” This surely sounds as though it has roots in some ancient authority, though I have not traced it. With a flourish Longus then concludes the passage by noting that the animal’s swimming skills are proven by the many locations named Oxford (in Greek Βόσπορος) in the world.
     The passage stands out for its singularity but also because, though it has no relevance to the larger story, the author with a sort of lavish liberality not only raises the topic but then extends it. He possesses a sort of grand vision of the sort that tends to appear toward the end of an age in which every detail is worthy of examination since all are of equal significance. I am reminded of Athenaeus’ diners who never hesitate to spin off into a discussion of anything whatever, or of Robert Burton’s essays, or of the unpredictable, stream-like flow of conversation in a social group or of reminiscence on a page of Proust. Longus here is leisurely and learned and quaint, a collector of curious lore like a provincial Victorian cleric erudite in Greek and Latin but assigned a church among farmers, who keeps his erudition active by expounding as an amateur on local antiquities or butterflies or varieties of moss.
     I would be hard put to justify this passage in terms of the efficient design of the story’s aesthetic structure, but I, for one, welcome it as a reader. In the end it does contribute toward an understanding of the author’s sensibility, civilized and sophisticated, omnivorously curious, and friendly to all learning. I am reminded of a professor with whom I studied in graduate school who never prepared a lecture, but simply took off from the text under discussion and flew about with the freest of association from Sumer to situation comedies to Milton leaving some students nonplussed. It is because of him that my own advanced study, this note, for example, seemed to me plausible, yet he was not to everyone’s taste.

A Structural View of the Ephesiaca

     The Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus [1] has been long considered inferior to other Hellenistic novels or romances. In fact, early editors speculated that the extant text is not a finished work but a summary of a superior longer version. One critic arguing that main characters display significant growth and maturation [2] stands apart from the majority who find the chief interest of the work to be its action. Even those who translate Xenophon are tempted to condescension. One characterizes the book as "a specimen of penny dreadful literature” and another calls it the ancient version of a "rip-roaring action film." [3] They at least make it sound entertaining.
     The fact is that ancient Greek prose fiction in general tends like folk tales to focus with single-minded concern on a narrative thread, with little description of settings and virtually no analysis or development of character. In the Ephesiaca the incidents are implausible and repetitive, the characters flat and unchanging, and the narration generally spare. The story does include an elaborate rhetorical show-piece: the wonderful ekphrasis on the canopy above the lovers’ marriage bed. The lush and luxurious texture of this passage, lit with an erotic glow, very like the art object it describes, only emphasizes the plainness of much of the story's prose.
     For the most part the narration is unadorned and simple, proceeding rapidly from one incident to the next. Like Lazarillo de Tormes or the Chinese Water Margin it is episodic and paratactic in structure. Very little builds on what comes before or prepares for what follows. The story could be lengthened or shortened without damaging its pattern or meaning.
     This is far, of course, from the qualities prized in modern novels. Yet these very attributes that underlie the book’s lack of appeal to many moderns may also be the basis for the pleasure its original audience felt when reading it. The primary motive for such a plot is aesthetic, the purely formal appeal of the pattern, similar to the pleasure the listener has in a Bach fugue or in certain works of abstract visual art. Even when viewing natural objects, such as the silhouettes of trees or the colors of a sunset, the human sensibility seeks satisfying unintentional structures. The author has set in motion a number of psychologically potent elements which then mutate and repeat in striking formal patterns. [4]
     The entire plot might be schematically represented, but perhaps it will be sufficient to describe the first two books to establish the structure which remains largely fixed throughout. The hero of the Ephesiaca is introduced less as an individual than as a paragon of masculine excellence, extraordinary in beauty and character, justified in his arrogance. He is Man writ large. Almost like Gilgamesh whose powers required the counterbalance of Enkidu, Anthia then appears as his female counterpart, exemplifying the qualities most prized in women. The single cell has divided in two.
     The two then lose their peace and happiness and fall into the hands of pirates upon which each receives an unwanted lover, their evil Doppelgängers in a sense, Corymbos for Habrocomes and Euxinos for Anthia. Ease has been replaced by its polar opposite suffering and the two leading protagonists has each attracted an antagonist.
     In Book II a secondary doubling occurs on the axis of social class. The hero and heroine each receive a counterpart on a lower social level in Leucon and Rhode whose adventures parallel and support those of the leading players. Apsyrtos, the leader of the pirate gang, then provides a synthesis that envelops the pattern by taking Habrocomes, Anthia, Leucon, and Rhode into his custody. A new threat then appears as Aspyrtos’ iniquitous male authority is matched by his daughter Manto. Infatuated with Habrocomes, she denounces him when he fails to return her affection. Not only is he then tortured; Anthia is given to the same Manto who has her married to a poor goatherd.
     Soon both escape their perils, but only temporarily, and so the story goes with further variations, playing with the author’s set of bipolar oppositions – male/female, pleasure/suffering, rich/poor – which proceed in a regular stylized pattern reminiscent of fractals until the happy conclusion. Yet since the incidents of the story do refer to recognizable human experience, they possess thematic resonance as well. In a work of art nothing is unintentional. The novel does present themes: in the most general way the culture’s male and female ideals, the instability of fortune, and the mysterious mixture of aggression and compassion that characterizes sexual relations. In Greek mythological terms, the story relays the chastening of arrogance by Eros, and the celebration of Isis, the embodiment of the Great Goddess.
     The play of transformation in the Ephesiaca collects around several foci of the sort that Freud might have called cathexes. The anxiety and desire that enwraps love and death, pleasure and suffering renders these topics endlessly interesting to our species. This narrative allows the reader to contemplate the mutations of fortune in wonder and amazement. Individualized psychological studies or social analyses are not the only functions of fiction, nor are they necessarily the most sublime. Perhaps modern critics no longer share the taste that allowed earlier readers to relish formal play in fiction as they did in poetic meter. It may be that the sense of an orderly world that underlies the pleasure of viewing human experience as a delightfully kaleidoscopic marvel is rare in this belated age.


1. In English sometimes called the An Ephesian Tale. The author is, of course, to be distinguished from Socrates’ student, Xenophon of Athens. The question of the text being an epitome remains controversial today.

2. See Aldo Tagliabue, “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman,” in Ancient Narrative, Vol. 10, 17–462.

3. Graham Anderson and Stephen Trzaskoma.

4. I am not wholly original in this reading. Earlier critics who have made structural analyses of the Ephesiaca include R. W. Garson (“The Faces of Love in Ephesiaca or Anthia and Habrocomes,” Museum Africum, 7, 47-55), David Konstan (Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres, Princeton U.P., Princeton), and J. R. Morgan in several studies, but especially “Travel in the Greek Novel: Function and Interpretation” in C. Adams and J. Roy’s Travel, Geography, and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 10, Oxford, 139-160.