The Pastoral Parents of Daphnis and Chloe

Abstract

Scholarship on Longus’s 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. 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. This article argues that Longus’s pastoral landscapes, signaled chiefly by the locus amoenus, have a primarily reproductive rather than erotic function. These landscapes introduce 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.