As we read this pastoral romance, the unknown author becomes to us a real personality. His delight in the country is spontaneous and real. He is a cultured person with genuine appreciation of art, music and literature. Their influence enriches his story. Longus in his preface tells how a painting which he chanced to see in the grove of the Nymphs gave the inspiration for the writing of his novel, for the painting pictured a history of love and he longed to write something that would correspond to the picture. Paintings again he mentions in his description of a shrine of Dionysus, paintings telling all the myths of the god.[248] The images of the Nymphs in the cave are described carefully by him: cut out of the rock they were, feet unshod, arms bare to the shoulders, hair falling on their necks, their garments belted, a smile in their eyes.[249] A statue of Pan stood under his sacred pine until at the end Daphnis and Chloe built him a shrine.[250] Over and over these representations are referred to as symbols of very present gods.
The music that fills the romance is the sound of the shepherds’ pipes and the voice of song. Daphnis makes a pipe of reeds and teaches Chloe how to play on it.[251] So well did she learn that on Dorco’s pipe she could call the cattle back from the raiders’ ship.[252] When spring brought them out-doors, both Daphnis and Chloe challenged the nightingales with their piping and the birds answered.[253] Philetas the old herdsman outdid all in playing on the great organ-pipe of his father. He played special strains for cows and oxen, for goats, for sheep. He played too the melody of Dionysus and to it Dryas footed the dance of the vintage. Daphnis too played on Philetas’ pipe a love-song and danced with Chloe the story of the origin of the pipe, Pan’s wooing of the maid Syrinx.[254]
Daphnis displayed his art for his own father and mother, before he was recognized as their son, to do them pleasure. He blew the call of the goats; he blew their soft lullaby; he blew their grazing tune; he blew the alarm for a wolf; he blew the recall. And the goats responded to all his different strains.[255] After the wedding the shepherds piped the bride and groom to bed and sang outside their door a rude, harsh song, no Hymenaeus, but such as they were wont to sing when with their picks they broke the earth.[256] For country people sang at all their tasks: the boatman on the river,[257] the herdsman in the pastureland.
More pervasive than all other influences in the romance is the literary. Theocritus colors the whole story. There are a few reminiscences of Bion[258] and Moschus,[259] but it was the Sicilian goatherd par excellence who instructed Longus as he did Lamo in his story.[260] Calderini shows the various traces of the inspiration which Longus received from the Alexandrian idyl. There is a continuous alternation of descriptions of nature with descriptions of emotion all composed with a certain serenity and restraint. The pain is not too violent; the descriptions of nature are not too detailed or pedantic. There are many special similar motives: the descriptions of paintings and statues; the fear and the protection of Pan and the Nymphs; the vengeance of Eros on those who scorn him; the young lovers who frequent the gymnasia and the palestra; love which is born on the day of a festival; the woe of love; the violent, brutal love of a scorned shepherd; the patron who lives at a distance.[261] The pastoral name Daphnis is taken from the ideal shepherd of Theocritus and Vergil. Pastoral setting and pastoral narrative have the flavor of Theocritus. Episodes are identical: Chloe plaits a tiny cage for a grasshopper as did the young lad carved on the bowl of ivy-wood.[262] Daphnis and Chloe as they sit kissing each other on the hill see a fisherman’s boat passing on the sea and listen to his song.[263] So in Theocritus lovers on the land embracing look out at the far distant sea.[264] But above all, Longus saw as Theocritus did that in the lives of herdsmen lay true romance, and while Theocritus sang his short lays, closely affiliated with the mimes in their use of the comic, Longus lifted the love of goatherd and shepherd to the realm of pure fiction by idealization and tenderness. His originality was in making young love grow with the seasons to maturity. The name of his heroine, Chloe, a young green shoot, is symbolic of this growing life.[265] His awareness of his unique contribution to romance perhaps appears in his title: The Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloe.
Sappho too was known and cherished by Longus. There is a possible reminiscence in the description of Daphnis turning paler than grass in its season.[266] There is a sure reminiscence of Sappho’s hyacinth on the mountains crushed by the feet of the passing shepherds in Lamo’s pity for his flowers trodden down by a marauder.[267] And to Sappho Longus owes the climax of Daphnis’ wooing at the end of Book III when he pulls “the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,” saved by Fortune for a shepherd in love, and putting it in Chloe’s bosom makes it a symbol of her beauty and his prize.[268]
Drama too had a definite influence on Longus, indeed the word δρᾶμα or δραματικόν is applied to these romances by Photius.[269] The two recognition scenes in which Daphnis and Chloe find parents through the tokens placed with them when they were exposed as babies are copied from tragedy. New Comedy furnished at least three characters to the romance, Gnatho the parasite, Sophrone the nurse who exposed the baby Daphnis[270] and the city wench, Lycaenium. Elegiac poetry furnished Philetas, the father perhaps of erotic elegiacs. Echo repeating the name of Amaryllis suggests Vergil.[271] And Ovid perhaps contributed three names: Astylus, Dryas and Nape.[272] The influence of the rhetorical schools is slighter than in the other romances, but appears in the court-room scene with its speeches and in the use of parallelism and contrast. Parallelism, as Calderini says,[273] includes all the plot of the romance and proceeds from the number and selection of the characters to the variety of the secondary episodes and to the description of the smallest details. Daphnis and Chloe are both exposed, both rescued by shepherds. Both are kidnapped. An attack on Chloe is made by Dorco, on Daphnis by Gnatho. Chloe touches Daphnis when he is bathing and falls in love. Daphnis kisses Chloe and his heart rises to his lips. Astylus, the city son of Dionysophanes, is sophisticated, Daphnis is virginal. The oath of Daphnis is matched by the oath of Chloe. On and on proceeds this balancing. And the parallelism appears not only in plot, but in details of phrase and sentence structure: balanced rhythmical phrases set off by rhymes or alliterations; bipartite or tripartite periods, elaborate in their rhetorical structure. Sometimes indeed Longus’ Pastorals seem written in modern verse, indeed they are written in poetic prose.[274]
Out of all these interests in art, music and literature and beyond them Longus has created a style peculiarly his own and suited to his pastoral romance. His sentence structure is simple and paratactic. His comparisons are drawn from the life of shepherds. Chloe is as restive as a heifer.[275] Dorco claims he is as white as milk but Daphnis says Dorco is as red as a fox.[276] Daphnis and Chloe run about like dogs freed from their leashes.[277] Chloe plunders from Daphnis’ mouth a bit of cake as though she were a young bird being fed.[278]
Description and narration are as vivid as these little similes. We are made to see Daphnis at his bath: his hair black and thick, his body sun-burned dark as though colored by the shadow of his hair;[279] the coming of spring with flowers covering the valleys and the mountains, bees humming, birds warbling, lambs gamboling; the vintage scene with the peasants all busy in the vineyard with the wine-presses, the hogsheads, the baskets, and the grapes;[280] the winter landscape with the deep snow, the rushing torrents, the ice, the laden trees;[281] the country wedding with the feast on beds of green boughs before the cave of the Nymphs, the songs of the reapers and the vintners, the dancing to the pipes, the goats sharing the feast, the bridal procession with its piping and singing.[282]
Longus’ art of narration is employed as skillfully as are his descriptions. This art appears not only in the pattern of the whole romance, but in the skillful use of stories within the story to diversify and enliven the longer narrative. After the feast of Dionysus, the old men, their tongues loosed with wine, fell into reminiscence and told tales to each other:
“how bravely in their youth they had administered the pasturing of their flocks and herds, how in their time they had escaped very many invasions and inroads of pirates and thieves. Here one bragged that he had killed a wolf, here another that he had bin second to Pan alone in the skill and art of piping.”[283]