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  • The Pastoral Parents of Daphnis and Chloe*
  • Arum Park

INTRODUCTION

Scholarship on Longus’s1 Daphnis and Chloe tends to center on eroticism or pastoralism or the interplay of the two in the infusion of Theocritean innocence into the Greek narrative prose tradition of heterosexual love.2 Although these approaches examine Longus’s careful construction of an eroticized pastoral world, they tend to overlook the reproduction and parenthood that also inform Longus’s pastoralism. I will argue that Longus’s pastoral landscapes, signaled chiefly by the locus amoenus, have a primarily reproductive rather than erotic function. These landscapes introduce [End Page 253] parenthood and childcare as themes that, in turn, serve as metaphors for the creative process behind the novel itself. By shifting the focus to the reproductive and parental aspects of Daphnis and Chloe, I will illuminate a hybrid quality to Longus’s pastoralism that has not been fully explored but is a key aspect of his pastoral art.

While the pastoral locus amoenus often suggests sexual activity, in Daphnis and Chloe it is also closely linked to the procreative result of such activity. This association between eroticism, reproduction, and the natural world has precedents in earlier literature, such as at Iliad 14.346–49, when the ground spontaneously sprouts grass, lotus, crocus, and hyacinth during Hera’s seduction of Zeus—a metaphor so thinly veiled that it hardly needs explaining.3 Similarly, the prologue to Lucretius’s de Rerum Natura invokes Venus as overseer of his poetic creation and thus connects her sexual allure to procreation (DRN 1.1–25). Her generative powers are manifest not only in human reproduction but in all natural creation: she is hailed as the mother of Aeneas (1.1), the goddess responsible for the conception of all living things (4–5), and for the growth of flowers (7–8); the whole world, plant and animal, is subject to her influence. Indeed, Paul Turner identifies similar parallels between Lucretius’s Venus and Longus’s Eros (2.7) that suggest, at the very least, a prevailing conception of sexual love as a procreative force (1960.118–19). Furthermore, organic connections between land and people were crystallized in local autochthony myths in, for example, Thebes and Athens.4

Despite this ancient association between natural landscapes, sexual activity, and procreation, the scholarship on Longus tends not to discuss the connection. As Helen Morales observes (2008, esp. 39–42), the last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in the history of sexuality, thanks in large part to the influence of Michel Foucault.5 This [End Page 254] interest, coupled with the ancient novel’s own focus on sex, has prompted scholarly attention to turn to the erotic rather than to those reproductive aspects of nature in Daphnis and Chloe that are also central to the novel.6 The close associations between nature and procreation are key to understanding Longus’s pastoralism, which nods to the erotic preoccupations of Theocritean and Vergilian bucolic while stressing, through its procreative metaphor, the strength of this literary debt.

I will demonstrate that any eroticism of the pastoral landscape must be understood in conjunction with those reproductive qualities that foster parental behavior. With its generative associations, Longus’s locus amoenus is analogous to a biological parent, but it also inspires nurturing activity in those who enter it, notably the animals and humans who rescue Daphnis and Chloe from exposure. The relationship between Daphnis, Chloe, and the various components of their pastoral surroundings, from the setting to the characters within it, resembles a parent-child relationship wherein the pastoral setting “gives birth” to them and ultimately ensures their survival.

By extension, this relationship has implications for the literary identity of Longus’s novel. The pastoral locus amoenus serves both a psychological function as a pseudo-parent for the two title characters and a metaliterary function as a metaphor for Longus’s allusivity. By ascribing agency to the pastoral landscape and by describing Daphnis and Chloe’s devotion—both fostered and innate—to this landscape and the life it represents, Longus alludes to his own literary debt and suggests that this debt is both imposed on but also chosen by...

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