While I was gazing on and admiring these and other love scenes in the painting, suddenly I was seized by a longing to write an idyll to describe it. So I found a man to explain it for me and I have written a story in four books, an offering to the god of Love and to the Nymphs and Pan, and a joy for ever to mankind to heal their sickness and soothe their grief, to recall the sweets of love to those that have tasted them and to initiate those who have not into its secrets.
In the Prologue the author asserts the stimulation behind his writing of the story. While on the isle of Lesbos, the author claims to have seen a painting which included: women and their babies, children being suckled by sheep, expressions of romantic vows and pirates! This is the story told in visual form which engineered on the part of the author and desire to do something similar in literary form. Although it may not seem like it now, such a goal was truly revolutionary as stories for centuries had traditionally been long on plot and action, but notably short on imagery and description. This is where Longus (or whomever actually wrote the story) breaks off from that which had come before and sets the novel on its way, crudely though it may seem compared to the novel as most know it.
In the island of Lesbos is the fair and noble city of Mytilene…cleft by canals filled by the inflowing tide, and stately bridges of white, polished marble adorn it…about five and twenty miles distant from Mytilene a wealthy landowner had his seat, a fair and goodly estate, with mountains full of wild beasts for the chase, rich cornfields, vineclad slopes and pasture-lands and hard by along the far-stretching coastline the sea gently lapped the smooth sand.
It does not take long for the author to blast through tradition. The opening paragraph of the story asserts its visual inspiration like a proclamation. One can fairly see in their mind exactly what the author is describing as though it were paint on a canvas. Such imagery of apparently mundane details stands in stark contrast to the tradition preceding it in which such descriptive details would be expended only upon the most vital of information to the story’s hero. Such a tradition traces as far back as the Old Testament; while the Bible includes its fair share of memorable imagery, as far as the details of the story being told goes, it is very thin, indeed. The point of the story is gotten to quickly, made clear and then left behind. The kind of extraneous detail about a city and a landowner expressed here would not only be deemed unnecessary by writers of the past, but would be unthinkable as the place to start the story.
“The nightingales sing sweetly, yet my pipe is mute ; the kids frisk merrily, and I sit listless : the flowers bloom rarely, I weave no chaplets : the violet and hyacinth are in full blossom, and I, hapless Daphnis, droop and fade away. Shall Dorcon then be found fairer than I?”
Well, it is a love story, after all. And the two title characters are just teenagers who have been abandoned practically since birth. So a little innocence on the part of Daphnis can be excused here. Like Romeo, Daphnis is a bit more sophisticated in his language than one might expect, but this story was written about 1500 years—give or take—before realism finally reached the point in the history of the novel at which it was finally accepted and embraced. While a revolutionary text from certain perspectives, the story of young love is quite traditional in others. Dorcon, by the way, is the main rival of Daphnis for the love of Chloe.
Daphnis, it chanced, was not among his goats, but in the higher woods engaged in cutting leaves for winter fodder for the kids and when from the heights he saw them landing he hid himself in a withered oak's hollow bole. But meanwhile Chloe tended both flocks and when pursued fled hot foot as suppliant to the Nymphs and in their name she begged her pursuers to spare her and her flocks but all in vain, the soldiers jeered at the images and drove off the flocks and Chloe too, striking her with twigs as though she were a goat or sheep.
Though a romantic tale of young love, all does not go smoothly. Traces of the tradition of the heroic narrative with an emphasis on action and event are not just to be found, but prevalent. The focus is not upon the action, but rather how the external events and actions play out upon the titular romantic duo. As this passage reveals, this is hardly a love story of the simplistic type. Dorcon won’t survive his showdown with the pirates and here these same marauders show themselves to be of a much lower order of humanity than the young lovers and those who tend to their passion.
