First Love

I can recall precisely where I was when Daphnis and Chloe opened in my hands like a flower: sitting on my father’s couch, my back to the window and the sun all around. Suddenly I felt the force of a wholly new, an important idea, something I had never considered quite that way before. I closed the book and, somewhat ridiculously, looked at its cover. My Penguin edition of Daphnis and Chloe was blurbed by Goethe: ‘One would do well to read it every year, to be instructed by it again and again, and to receive anew the impression of its great beauty.’

The age of this story makes my living response all the more remarkable. Its author, Longus, flourished somewhere around the second century ad. The story takes place maybe 700 years earlier. Classicists are expected to be impressed, even awed, by the works of classical literature. But to be touched by writing so old is not a common experience, at least for me. I had read Homer’s Iliad, and the writing at times would sweep me away – on the open sea with gale-force winds and crushing walls of waves, until swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore, I would rise crusted with salt but lifted with joy to plant my feet on solid ground. Virgil’s Aeneid, on the other hand: hardcore. A diamond style. One of my favourite lines of Cicero is the first in a wheedling, oleaginous letter to a potential biographer: ‘I am on fire with an insane lust that you will immortalize my deeds in your writing.’ I also like the slightly nobler: ‘There is nothing so demented that it has not been said by some philosopher.’ The multifaceted poetry of Catullus amazed me, and I even translated some of his more illustrious gems. But none of these legendary writers inspired the love that Longus did. The author is a bit of a mystery. We know literally nothing about him and even his name is a misspelling. Because Daphnis and Chloe is set on Lesbos, with beautiful descriptions of its countryside and capital city, Mytilene, one suspects that Longus lived there. Possibly he was a member of a famous family of that cognomen, which came from Pompeii, had ties with Mytilene, and produced distinguished historians and wives of consuls. Longus’s story centres around two foundlings, Daphnis and Chloe, who are exposed as babies and adopted by two pairs of simple, childless bucolics. The two children grow up together and, because they are noble, are taller and more beautiful than the local peasants (this, to us, objectionable sentiment is standard in classical literature). They fall in love, after many false starts and wrong turns, and must overcome a number of obstacles, including rivals, pirates, kidnappers and their own ignorance, before they can finally unite. Translate Lesbos to Manhattan, change Daphnis to Donald, and, mutatis mutandis, you could spend fifty million on the movie without anyone being the wiser. By the time Longus began to write, the genre of Greek romancewas already well-developed, and he satirizes many of its conventions with brilliant effect. But the sustained philosophical core of the book is serious. As he says in the prologue, Daphnis and Chloe was meant to be:

on the one hand, an offering to Eros and the Nymphs and Pan, on the other a pleasant possession for all mankind, which heals those suffering from sickness and consoles the pained, to remind who has loved and to instruct who has not. For nobody has entirely escaped Eros, or will, so long as there might be beauty and eyes to see.

Longus interweaves these immortal themes within the sweetest of narrative tones. The book has the sober restraint of philosophy, the simple vividness of a fairy tale, and the generous narrative flow of true storytelling. The prose itself beats at times with poetic rhythm, and sections of McCail’s translation for the Oxford University Press fly into enjambment

quite suddenly, to get the effect of the Greek.

Longus’s ambition to provide a possession for all mankind is an intentional echo of Thucydides, who called his History of the Peloponnesian War a ‘possession for all time’. As we now know, they both pulled it off. I am not a big consumer of the romance genre, but I do have some knowledge of its conventions. I can confidently say that Daphnis and Chloe is one of the wisest romances ever written.

The love Longus describes permeates all of nature and is a love far larger than the mere human variety. Animals are everywhere in the story – birds and bees, wolves and sheep, battling rams, swimming cows, war-provoking goats. Nearly every animal is associated in some way with either predation or reproduction, and occasionally both. This is sometimes done obviously, for example a would-be rapist dresses up in wolf-skins to surprise Chloe, or in a more subtle fashion, as when a grasshopper, ‘trying to escape from a swallow that wanted to capture it’, lands in Chloe’s bosom.

Hunting, with its double meaning, is likewise everywhere. The dual themes of hunting and love are linked by more than the chase, though plenty of chasing goes on in the book. The deeper association is with killing and eating. The systematic connection of predation to both food and romance creates a naturalistic, realistic and philosophically redolent atmosphere for a love story. The result is a thorough intertwining of pleasure and pain, life and death, sex and food.

To my mind the greatest and deepest part of the narrative is the ignorance of both lovers. After he sees Chloe bathing, at the end of Book One, Daphnis feels that his soul has been stolen from his chest. He cannot sleep and, knowing nothing of Love’s piracy, confuses his state with an illness. At another time, inspired by the randy rams of the herd, he and Chloe decide to experiment with sex. They fail miserably, and Daphnis weeps ‘to think that even the rams knew more about the deeds of love than he did’. Not long afterwards, Daphnis receives instruction rather vividly. The widow Lycaenion, herself rather predatory, takes Daphnis into the forest and teaches him what a man should do. Afterwards, she warns him that Chloe will not like it, but will ‘scream and burst into tears, and lie there streaming with blood, as though you’d murdered her’.

The idea which bloomed in me the first time I read Daphnis and Chloe is related to both this naturalism and the need for instruction. I realized that Longus was describing, in intimate detail, the creation of erotic desire. Never had I suspected that the dimensions of erotic desire were constructed by imitation, and through guesses at the expectations of others. The love of Daphnis and Chloe succeeds, but only because a great many other personalities involve themselves in it. The gods and the nymphs, the experienced men and women of the island, the parents and guardians, everyone has a role in the ultimate union. And so what comes naturally to the rams must be taught to the children. Before Daphnis and Chloe, I thought of nature and nurture as two polar opposites, irreconcilable. Now, perhaps, I think of them as symbiotic.

When, many years later, I wrote a Ph.D. on the subject of the Greek conception of love, I returned to Daphnis and Chloe. I learned that Longus inspired the music of Ravel, Offenbach and Gluck, that he influenced Shakespeare’s As You Like It and that Chagall produced radiant lithographs commissioned for the Amyot translation in 1961. Some have even suggested that Titian’s Three Ages of Man is inspired by scenes from the novel. As I advanced in my study of literature, however, the joys of reading naïvely for the first time, of being charmed and instructed at once, paled and were attenuated. In their place stood a lot of erudition and analysis. I do not feel this to be a fair trade. Somewhere in the course of loving stories, I fell in with an attitude that was less generous than the stories themselves. Conceivably, one can be a critic of literature and maintain a childlike love for the subject, but this magical feat of double-think has remained beyond my grasp. Despite the many valuable things I gained through advanced theorizing about literature, none of them compares to the wonder of my naïve love. I am trying to get back to that now. What I felt at that blooming moment was an effect I imagine all real writers strive for, all real readers long for: a seamless blend of beauty and epiphany. The translator Ronald McCail calls Longus’s work ‘one of the most accessible and easily appreciated of Greek books’. He is surely correct.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 26 © Adam Kay 2010