The prose fiction of antiquity has been the subject of increasing scholarly attention in the last twenty-five years, and Daphnis & Chloe has benefited from this general revival of interest. Nevertheless, critical progress has been hindered by the lack of a basic guide to the literary and rhetorical background against which this work was written. The present essay is an attempt to fill that gap. I have tried to combine information of a kind which is usually found in a continuous commentary with an outline of the various interpretative directions in which that information points. About the Origins of the Greek Novel', the problem which has dominated scholarship in this field ever since the publication of Erwin Rohde's magnificent study Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer, I have said very little, although Longus' exploitation of the traditions of historiography and comedy serves as a reminder of two major influences on the fiction of later antiquity. My silence on this subject will, I hope, suggest that it is unhelpful to view Daphnis & Chloe as ‘the standard ancient novel’ relocated in a pastoral setting and that a solution to the problem of the origins of the genre as a whole is unlikely also to supply the key to an appreciation of a particular example of the genre. The Greek novels which survive in a manuscript tradition differ from each other so widely in terms of wit, rhetorical skill and narrative coherence that, even after the standard division into pre-sophistic (Xenophon of Ephesus, Chariton) and sophistic (Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus), it makes very little sense to treat them as though they were almost identical specimens off a production-line.

Even the most casual reader cannot fail to notice that Longus constantly invites us to read his novel at more than one level; almost any passage points the reader in more than one direction, and it has been a major concern of recent Longan scholarship to establish whether any one direction takes precedence over the others or imposes a coherent and consistent pattern on the novel. In this chapter I wish to explore certain aspects of D&C with particular attention not to coherent patterns but rather to the novel's ambiguities and open-endedness.

Daphnis & Chloe

It has long been recognised that Longus has blurred the status of Daphnis and Chloe so that we are unsure whether to regard them as human or divine. Although it was not uncommon both in real life and on the comic stage for children to be exposed at birth, it is virtually only in myth that they are saved and suckled by animals, and many ancient cultures had stories of gods and the children of gods who were reared in this way. In particular, given the debt of the story to formal drama (cf. below pp. 67–70), Longus may have remembered Euripides' heroine Melanippe whose twin sons by Poseidon were suckled by a cow. Daphnis himself points out that Zeus also was suckled by a goat, and he then proceeds in the same chapter to compare himself first to Pan and then to Dionysus (1.16.3–4); the general similarities between Daphnis and Pan are indeed too striking for any reader to miss.

The manuscripts of Longus' novel most commonly refer to the work as ποιμϵνικὰ τά πϵρὶ [or κατὰ] Δὰφνιν και χλόην or simply ποιμϵνικὰ, but once as αὶπολικὰ τὰ κατὰ χλόηρ και Δὰφνι,ν and (in the colophon in the Florentine manuscript) as ποιμϵνικὰ τὰ πϵρὶ Δὰφνιν και χλόην Δϵοβιακὰ ϵρωτικὰ. In the manuscript tradition, the novels of Xenophon of Ephesus (τὰ κατὰ Άνθὶαν και Άβροκόμην ϵφϵσω,κὰ) and Heliodorus (ή χαρὶκλϵιχι, τὰ πϵρὶ Θϵαγένην και χαρὶκλϵιαν or Λιβωπικὰ τὰ πϵρὶ Θϵαγένην και χαρὶκλϵιαν) share with D&C a system of naming both by description and from the principal charac¬ters, whereas the novels of Chariton and Achilles Tatius are designated only by the names of the characters. The fact that later Byzantine novelists seem to have used only the personal naming system and that a scrap from a late second-century A.D. text of the novel of Lollianus (fr. A2a verso Henrichs) calls that work φοινικικὰ might suggest that most novels were originally given (presumably by their authors) des¬criptive titles such as Έφϵσιακὰ or Aὶθιοπικὰ and that the personal titles came into use later. If this is correct, then the original title of D&C was Λϵσβιακὰ or ποιμϵνικὰ or Λϵσβιακὰ ποιμϵνικὰ, and it is relevant here to note that the final words of the novel are ποιμένων παὶγνια. With ποιμϵνικὰ may be compared the title of Petronius' comic romance, if that has been correctly explained as σατυρικὰ (i.e. σατυρικών libri): both of these titles keep the form of a ‘local’ title such as Έφϵσιακὰ (a form ultimately derived from epic and historiography) but are purely descriptive. Nevertheless, it seems improbable that one style only was in use in antiquity and that the others are wholly Byzantine or mediaeval.