Literal Truth, Mythic Truth and Narrative in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe

This essay considers the narrative genres of mythos and logos and their relation to the ideology of Daphnis and Chloe. Longus asserts that his novel will be both pleasurable and useful (Pr.3), rejecting the choice posed by Thucydides between pleasure or utility (1.22.4), mythos or logos. Three inserted mythoi give the protagonists pleasure despite the disturbing violence done to the female protagonists. Chloe, too, is the subject of a mythos created by Eros (2.27); however, bourgeois marriage renders her subordination benign. Chloe’s mythos also idealizes Daphnis’s life as a slave. In the war between Mitylene and Methymna, Longus narrates the seizure of Chloe and agricultural workers (2.20). While Chloe is rescued, those seized with her are taken away as slaves, characters in a Thucydidean logos about war rather than Eros’s idealizing mythos. Through this contrast in genre, Longus reminds the reader of the harsh world outside his mythos about love.