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.