Delphi Complete Works of Longus

by Longus

  4.38 As it was a very fine day, Dionysophanes ordered couches of green leaves to be spread in front of the grotto, invited all the villagers to the festivities, and entertained them handsomely. Lamon and Myrtale were there, together with Dryas and Nape, Dorcon’s relations, Philetas and his sons, Chromis and Lycaenium: even Lampis was forgiven, and allowed to be present. All the amusements were of a rustic and pastoral character, as was natural, considering the guests. One sang a reaper’s song, another repeated the jests of the vintage season: Philetas played the pipe, Lampis the flute, Dryas and Lamon danced: Daphnis and Chloe embraced each other. The goats also were feeding close at hand, as if they desired to take part in the banquet. This was not altogether to the taste of the city people: but Daphnis called some of them by name, gave them some green leaves to eat, took them by the horns and kissed them.

  Κατὰ ταυτὰ οὐ τότε μόνον ἀλλ̓ ἔστε ἔζων τὸν πλεῖστον χρόνον ποιμενικῶς διῆγον, θεοὺς σέβοντες Νύμφας καὶ Πᾶνα καὶ Ἔρωτα, ἀγέλας δὲ προβάτων καὶ αἰγῶν πλείστας κτησάμενοι, ἡδίστην δὲ τροφὴν νομίζοντες ὀπώραν καὶ γάλα. Ἀλλὰ καὶ ἄρρεν παιδίον ὑπέθηκαν αἰγὶ καὶ θυγάτριον γενόμενον δεύτερον οἰὸς ἑλκύσαι θηλὴν ἐποίησαν, καὶ ἐκάλεσαν τὸν μὲν Φιλοποίμενα τὴν δὲ Ἀγέλην, καὶ τὸ ἄντρον ἐκόσμησαν καὶ εἰκόνας ἀνέθεσαν καὶ βωμὸν εἵσαντο Ποιμένος Ἔρωτος: καὶ τῷ Πανὶ δὲ ἔδοσαν ἀντὶ τῆς πίτυος νεὼν Πανὸς Στρατιώτου ὀνομάσαντες.

  4.39 And not only then, but as long as they lived, they devoted most of their time to a pastoral life. They paid especial reverence to the Nymphs, Pan, and Love, acquired large flocks of goats and sheep, and considered fruit and milk superior to every other kind of food. When a son was born to them, they put him to suck a goat: their daughter was suckled by a ewe: and they called the former Philopoemen, and the latter Agele. Thus they lived to a good old age in the fields, decorated the grotto, set up statues, and erected an altar to Shepherd Love, and, in place of the pine, built a temple for Pan to dwell in, and dedicated it to Pan the Soldier.

  Ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μὲν ὕστερον καὶ ὠνόμασαν καὶ ἔπραξαν: τότε δὲ νυκτὸς γενομένης πάντες αὐτοὺς παρέπεμπον εἰς τὸν θάλαμον, οἱ μὲν συρίττοντες, οἱ δὲ αὐλοῦντες, οἱ δὲ δᾷδας μεγάλας ἀνίσχοντες. Καὶ ἐπεὶ πλησίον ἦσαν τῶν θυρῶν, ᾖδον σκληρᾷ καὶ ἀπηνεῖ τῇ φωνῇ, καθάπερ τριαίναις γῆν ἀναρρηγνύντες, οὐχ ὑμέναιον ᾄδοντες. Δάφνις δὲ καὶ Χλόη γυμνοὶ συγκατακλινέντες περιέβαλλον ἀλλήλους καὶ κατεφίλουν, ἀγρυπνήσαντες τῆς νυκτὸς ὅσον οὐδὲ γλαῦκες: καὶ ἔδρασέ τι Δάφνις ὧν αὐτὸν ἐπαίδευσε Λυκαίνιον, καὶ τότε Χλόη πρῶτον ἔμαθεν ὅτι τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης γενόμενα ἦν ποιμένων παίγνια.

  4.40 But this did not take place until later. After the banquet, when night came, all the guests accompanied them to the nuptial chamber, playing on the pipe and flute, and carrying large blazing torches. When they were near the door, they began to sing in a harsh and rough voice, as if they were breaking up the earth with forks, instead of singing the marriage hymn. Daphnis and Chloe, lying naked side by side, embraced and kissed each other, more wakeful than the owl, the whole night long. Daphnis put into practice the lessons of Lycaenium, and then for the first time Chloe learned that all that had taken place between them in the woods was nothing more than the childish amusement of shepherds.

  The Biography

  Mithymna (Methymna), a municipality on the island of Lesbos, featured in the plot of ‘Daphnis and Chloe’

  INTRODUCTION TO LONGUS by J. M. Edmonds

  Loeb Classical Library edition, 1916

  Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon.

  Song of Solomon, 1. 7.

  I. — LONGUS

  NOTHING is known of the author of the Pastoralia. He describes Mytilene as if he knew it well, and he mentions the peculiarities of the Lesbian vine. He may have been a Lesbian, but such local colouring need not have been gathered on the spot, nor if so, by a native. His style and language are Graeco-Roman rather than Hellenistic; he probably knew Vergil’s Bucolics; like Strabo and Lucian he writes in Greek and yet bears a Roman name. Till the diggers discover a dated papyrus-fragment, we can say provisionally that he may have written as early as the beginning of the second century after Christ, probably not much later than the beginning of the third.

  Two of Longus’ characters connect him, indirectly at least, with the New Comedy, Gnatho the parasite, and Sophrone the nurse who exposed the infant Daphnis. It is to be noted that he and Horace, some of whose names are found like his in the New Comedy, are the only literary users of the name Chloe. He knows and loves his Sappho; witness the crushed but still beautiful flowers in the ravaged garden, and the lovely apple left by the gatherers upon the topmost bough. To Theocritus he plainly owes more than the locust-cage and the name Clearista. Not only has he numerous verbal imitations of Theocritus, but the whole atmosphere of the book is, in a sense, Theocritean. And there are passages reminiscent of the other Bucolic poets. In one place Longus definitely connects his rustic characters with the herdsmen of Bucolic poetry. When Lamo tells the Story of the Pipe, we are told that he had it from a Sicilian goatherd. And it is hardly going too far, perhaps, to see a similar intention in the name he gives to the old herdsman Philetas, who is second only to Pan in playing the pipe, and who tells Daphnis and Chloe the nature of love. For Philetas or Philitas was the father of Hellenistic poetry, the great man who taught the elegiac love-poet Hermesianax and the pastoral, epic, and lyric love-poet Theocritus, and was himself, perhaps, the first writer of love-tales in elegiac verse.

  This is the only Greek prose-romance we have which is purely pastoral, and the inclusion of this feature in its title may show that in this respect it was a new departure. It is by far the best of the extant romances. Rohde saw the forerunners of the prose-romance in two kinds of literature. The first is the erotic tale of the elegiac writers of the Hellenistic age, dealing with the loves of mythical personages. These poems formed the material of such works as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Three of Longus’ names, Astylus, Dryas, and Nape, are the names of mythical personages in Ovid. The second literary ancestor Rohde believed to be the travellers tale, such as the Indica of Ctesias, a type parodied by Lucian in the True History and not unconnected with the Utopias of Aristophanes, Plato, and others. A trace of this ancestry survives perhaps in the title of this book “The Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloe.”

  It is now generally thought that Rohde’s pedigree hardly accounts for all the facts. In Chariton’s Story of Chaereas and Callirrhoe, of which the date cannot be much later than 150 A.D. and may be a century earlier, the heroine is the daughter of Hermocrates, the Syracusan general of whom we read in Thucydides. The Romance of Ninus, of which a few pages have been found in Egypt, and which was probably written in the last century before Christ, is in all probability the love-story of the famous Semiramis and Ninus the founder of Nineveh. The author of the Ninus-romance takes two historical personages and weaves a story — not the traditional story — around them; Chariton, showing perhaps a later stage of development, merely tells us that his fictitious heroine was the daughter of an historical personage. These are the only instances, in the extant romances, of the consistent employment of historical matter. But they may well be the evolutionary survival
of a once essential feature. If so, our second forerunner will not be merely the traveller’s tale, but what often, as in the case of Herodotus, included it, history; but history, of course, in the Greek sense. For even in Thucydides there is an element of what to us is fiction, and the line between history and myth was never firmly drawn.

  The enormous preponderance, in the extant romances, of invented, and sometimes confessedly invented matter, matter having no foundation either in history or in mythology, and involving invented persons as well as invented circumstances, points again to elements outside of Rohde’s list. There may well be some connexion with the Mime, not only as we have it in the pages of Theocritus and

  Herodas, but in other forms for which we have scanty and fragmentary evidence. There is almost certainly a relationship with the New Comedy. As we have seen, two of Longus’ characters come ultimately from Menander; and there are instances, both in the Pastoralia and in the other romances, of the employment of two familiar dramatic devices, the ‘peripeteia’ or sudden change of fortune, and the ‘anagnorismos’ or recognition.

  But side by side with all these indications of a various ancestry in past forms of literature, there are certain considerations which betoken a very close — probably far closer — kinship with contemporary methods of education. The use of set speeches for “stock” occasions, of full-coloured descriptions of “repertory” scenes, of soliloquies in which the speaker debates with himself, and the frequently observed tendency of the narrative to arrange itself as a string of episodes — these considerations, combined with others of an external nature which are too long to he given here, point clearly to the schools of rhetoric, where Hannibal, according to Juvenal, “became a declamation,” and boys were taught to make speeches on imaginary themes. This form of education, which was in vogue as early as the last century before Christ, produced, in the second and third centuries of our era, the rhetoricians, half advocate, half public entertainer, known as “sophists.” Although there is no warrant in the manuscripts for describing him as “the Sophist,” Longus, to judge by his style, language, and matter, is to be reckoned of their number. He is far then from belonging to the best period of Greek literature. But to admit this, is not to deny his claim to the lesser sort of greatness. The first eleven chapters of his third book — the hard winter, Daphnis’ fowling expedition, the meeting of the parted lovers — are little short of a masterpiece. The truth is that the age which gave birth to Lucian was capable of much, and Longus has earned his fame by something more than a pretty story.

  II. — THE TEXT

  The following account of the manuscripts can make no claim to finality; for I have not had the time or the opportunity to do more than examine the various readings as they are recorded in print. But a comparison of all the passages where the MSS. are said to vary — these ‘number about two hundred and fifty — has enabled me to make a provisional stemma codicum, which I hope will not be without value to the future student of the text, For the readings of A and B, I have used (1) Seiler’s edition of 1843, which was based ultimately, through Sinner’s of 1829, upon Courier’s of 1810, (2) Cobet’s corrections of Courier’s account of A, made from an inspection of the MS. and published partly in Variae Lectiones and partly in the preface to Hirschig’s edition of 1856 (Didot), and (3) a few corrections of Cobet made by Castiglioni in Rivista di Filologia 1906; for the readings of the three Paris MSS. I have used Villoison’s edition of 1778; for the readings of the MS. of Alamannius and the three MSS. of Ursinus, I have used a copy of the Editio Princeps of 1598; for the readings of Amyot’s translation published in 1559, nearly forty years before the Greek text was printed, I have used the double French edition of 1757, which gives Amyot’s rendering side by side with a modern one. The weak point in this materia critica is the record of the readings of B; for there is good reason to believe that Courier’s scholarship was not always above suspicion. Still I believe it will be found that his account of B is substantially correct.

  About the year 1595 Fulvius Ursinus (Fulvio Orsini), the great scholar and collector of MSS. who from 1559 to his death in 1600 was librarian to the Farnese cardinals at Rome, appears to have made a MS. of the Pastor alia with marginal variants. This is the MS. mentioned by the scribe of Parisinus iii as having been collated by him in 1597, and it was doubtless from this MS. that Ursinus answered Columbanius’ request for variants on certain passages when he was preparing the Juntine edition of 1598. In compiling his MS. Ursinus used three MSS., known to editors as Ursiniani i, ii, and iii. These have not been identified, and their readings can only be gathered from the text and notes of the Juntine edition. Courier, however, speaks of the existence of other MSS. besides B in the Vatican Library; and since Ursinus is known to have bequeathed his collection to the Vatican, these may well prove to be the three Ursiniani.

  The MSS. of the Pastoralia at present known either from Columbanius’ edition or from the work of later editors, arrange themselves by means of the great lacuna comprising chapters 12 to 17 of the first book. This occurs in all the MSS. except A, which was discovered at Florence by P. L. Courier in 1809. The MSS. which have the lacuna arrange themselves further in two groups, one where it begins at § 13, which I call p, and the other where it begins in the middle of § 12, which I call q. The extension of the lacuna in the latter group was probably due to a clumsy piece of emendation; however it was caused, the former group, despite Courier s enthusiasm for B — an enthusiasm which B often deserves — must be considered as representing the older tradition.

  I have identified the three Ursiniani as follows, the first two belonging to p and the third to q: —

  Urs i: a MS. used by Amyot; this as well as Urs iii was perhaps acquired by Ursinus on Amyot’s death in 1593, Urs ii: a MS., from which Parisinus iii is partly derived,

  Urs iii: a MS. used by Amyot, ancestor of Parisini i and ii and (in common with Urs ii) of Parisinus iii. It appears to have had one variant derived from the common ancestor of itself and B, and four of its own, and due to emendation or correction. It also seems to have contained several lacunae which it did not share with B; some of these omissions, as appears from his translation, were regarded as correct by Amyot.

  Columbanius, the editor of the Juntine edition, the Editio Princeps of 1598, used, as he tells us, (1) a MS. belonging to Aloisius Alamannius, which I take to have been a conflation of Urss i and iii, with many but not all variations between these two MSS. added in the margin; (2) the readings sent him by Ursinus from the MS. Ursinus had copied and equipped with variants from his three MSS. (Urss i, ii, and iii). Ursinus does not appear to have made any note of correspondences between his MS. and the text of Columbanius, and it is important too to remember that the variants recorded as his in the Juntine edition are only those belonging to the passages on which he was consulted. In his note on page 82 he says: “Is [Ursinus] enim antequam nos hunc librum impressioni subijciendum traderemus, locos aliquot cum suis codicibus collatos, Roma ad nos remiserat.” It is clear that Columbanius had but one MS. He refers to it in the singular in several places, notably in his preface. In the two passages where he speaks of nostri libri, he means either the four “books” of the Pastoralia, or the MSS. from which both the text and the marginalia of his own MS. were derived. His note on p. 87 merely means that his MS. here had two marginal readings; and since all three readings were known to Ursinus, and he was asked only for variants, no note of Ursinus’ readings is made by Columbanius. It is unfortunate that Columbanius’ notes tell us neither which were the readings of Alamannius’ text and which of the margin, nor make any distinction of name in recording the variants of the three Ursiniani.

  The Parisini are all of the sixteenth century, i and ii belong to group q, and were derived from a copy of Urs iii which I call z. This contained the few variants of its parent, as well as about thirty derived from Urs ii. The special minor omissions of Urs iii, as well as those it shared with B, appear in Parr, i and ii. Par iii, though, unlike them, it has the less
er extent of the Great Lacuna, shows many ly of the same minor omissions. It may be regarded as a conflation of Urs ii and z. — Its margin contains (1) variants between Urs ii and z, (2) variants derived from no known source, perhaps readings of Urs ii rejected both by Ursinus when he compiled the conflation of his three. MSS. and by the scribe who added Urs ii’s variants to z. None of the latter are of the slightest value.

  There remain the two MSS. unknown to Columbanius and Ursinus no less than to Amyot, and discovered by Courier in 1809, Laurentianus (A) and Vaticanus (B). It is well known how Courier, after copying the new part of A, obliterated it, whether by accident or design, by upsetting his inkpot. Courier’s copy, upon which, as he perhaps intended, we are now almost entirely dependent, is probably correct enough in the main; but Cobet has shown, by comparing it with the few places still legible in the original, that the copy was unfortunately not altogether accurate. Apart from filling the Great Lacuna, A, though it contains many minor corruptions and some omissions, is of the greatest value as representing the oldest extant tradition. It is ascribed to the thirteenth century.

  Of Courier’s other discovery, B, I have found no description. His record of its readings is given by Seiler. It contains several special lacunae of minor importance and shares others with Urs iii, and, as belonging to q, does not represent so old a tradition as Urss i and ii; but it nevertheless fully deserves xviii the position assigned it by Courier of second in value to A.