2 - The constituent elements

Summary

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.