This chapter analyses several roles of silence in Greek novels before Heliodorus. On a macro-level, it suggests that the writing of the text was itself a breaking of silence, manifested in narrators’ openings in Achilles Tatius and Longus. Moving to characters, it reviews situations where the choice of silence is crucial to plot development – most far-reaching in Longus, where the couple’s origins must be concealed for four fifths of the narrative to allow them to grow up as simple herdsfolk. In Chariton too the choice between speech and silence repeatedly affects plot development. Silence is often allied with deception, twice with fear. In three novels a protagonist’s romantic involvement with a third party is crucially suppressed in communications between the couple. Next addressed are types of silence closely related to the novels’ central theme of eros, whether as a symptom, or the silent kissing Cleinias suggests to Cleitophon. Different is the silent awe a protagonist’s dazzling beauty triggers. Finally some topoi shared with other genres are examined: ‘everybody else was silent, but X began to speak’; and ‘for a long time X was silent, but eventually began to speak’. It is concluded that silence’s uses reveal it as an important element in constructing an engaging narrative, noting that of these writers only Longus has an ‘unmarked’ use of σιωπ- to mean little more than ‘he/she stopped speaking’.

This chapter examine some ways in which Greek novels flaunt and make play with their textuality, particularly Antonius Diogenes’ The incredible things beyond Thule and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. It argues that Antonius Diogenes presents recurrent tensions between the textual and the oral and highlights the importance of γράμματα, ‘letters’, to communication within his narrative, mirroring its writing down on wooden tablets that readers encounter in its frame. It also proposes meta-literary functions both for the name of the Arcadian envoy to Tyre, Κύμβας, ‘Cymbas’, since one of the meanings Hesychius gives the noun κύμβη is πήρα, ‘bag’ ( i.e. the receptacle in which the wizard Paapis carried his magic books) and for the twisting and turning of Mant(in)eas in P.Oxy. 4761. Longus apparently follows Antonius Diogenes in (unusually) specifying the number of his work’s books, but γράμματα, ‘letters’, have no role within his narrative (despite being taught to the young couple): that narrative is an entirely oral response by an unnamed exegete to a γραφή in the sense ‘painting’, and though within it tales are told, nothing is ever written or inscribed, not even in Dionysophanes’ paradeisos or in his civic elite world.

This chapter attempts a taxonomy of the metaphors in Daphnis and Chloe under the heads symptoms and concomitants of desire (where Longus’ metaphors situate his writing unambiguously in the Greek literature of ἔρως, ‘desire’); desire in society; anthropomorphisation of the inanimate and of animals; body-parts with a mind of their own; literary and meta-literary activity; and the world of learning.

This chapter explores the religious practice of characters in the five ‘ideal’ Greek novels, arguing that despite these works’ overall presentation of a world that is in many ways ‘realistic’, their representation of religion diverges from ‘reality’. At one end of the spectrum the behaviour of the rustic couple Daphnis and Chloe is almost hyper-religious, and it is only in Longus’ novel that we find a full range of traditional religious practices, including vows and libations. In the other four many features correspond to behaviour in the ‘real’ world – prayers, offerings, sacrifices, feasts and festivals: but libations are sometimes not poured when they might be expected; rituals associated with marriage or burial are omitted or played down; and, most strikingly, the practice of making a vow to a god at critical moments to secure help or rescue, a practice documented in the ‘real’ world by epigraphy and literature from the archaic period down to at least the third century AD, is wholly absent. Possible reasons for this absence are briefly discussed: is it simply a generally soft-focus and elliptical account of religious behaviour, or is it the avoidance of a device which, if deployed, would risk short-circuiting characters’ tension-creating peril in cliff-hanging situations?

This chapter argues that, unlike Dio in his Euboean Oration, in which the countryside is always presented positively and the city almost wholly negatively, Longus does not make his rustics entirely virtuous or his city-dwellers wholly bad. I differentiated between virtues of ἦθος, ‘character’, and virtues of πρᾶξις, ‘action’, illustrating the differences between those of the country and of the city by an analytical table. I noted especially Longus’ presentation of piety and impiety, of deception and of artifice, and of fear and boldness, concluding that the country’s vices prompt readers to reflection as much as do its virtues.

This chapter tabulates the number of pieces of direct discourse in each book of Daphnis and Chloe, the number of sentences in each of these, and the number of words in each sentence. As well as some immediately obvious results – e.g. that the first case of direct discourse in surprisingly late in Book 1 (1.14.1), and is given to Chloe; that the number of speeches, and speakers, rises book by book – it explores some of the effects Longus’ artistry achieves: the quasi-stichomythia of Daphnis’ internal debate at 3.6 and the stichomythic exchange between him and Chloe at 3.10; the play with vocatives; the differences between emotional reflections expressed in mainly short, paratactic sentences, and the instructions of Philetas, Lycaenion and of the Nymphs, the arguments of Lamon, or the pleas of Gnathon, all articulated in more complex sentences. Unlike Morgan 2021 it does not bring indirect discourse into the discussion.

This chapter analyses the novels’ poetic language, presenting some preliminary sondages which might indicate how much poetic vocabulary there is in three of our five complete Greek texts, and how much has classical and Hellenistic ancestry. It also looks selectively at the lexicon of some near-contemporary poets. Eight tables illustrate these heterogeneous sondages. After reviewing terms in Longus evoking epic, early melic poetry, and epigram, and some technical terms, it concludes that many words in Valley’s 1926 lists are not ‘simply’ poetic but are chosen to trigger some intertextuality, while others have little claim to be ‘poetic’ at all. Those remaining that cannot so be explained are few. Longus’ prose may be poetic in terms of his Theocritean subject, rhythmical sentences, and preference for parataxis over subordination: but his language is chiefly the language of prose. A brief overview of a small selection of potentially ‘poetic’ words in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus suggests that they too have only a low proportion of ‘poetic’ words, a view corroborated by the paucity of ‘poetic’ words in Marcellus poems from the Via Appia, in the poet(s) of the Sacerdos monument at Nicaea, and in a sample from Ps.-Oppian’s Cynegetica that are also in the novelists. It concludes that in this period poets and writers of novelistic prose still draw vocabulary from two different linguistic pools.

The first section of this chapter reworks ‘Les animaux dans le Daphnis and Chloé de Longus’ (2005) given to the second Tours colloque organized by Bernard Pouderon in 2002. After reviewing the roles played by animals (often of agents important for the plot), and noting their appearances’ frequent intertextuality with Homer, Hesiod, Alcaeus, Sappho and Theocritus, it turns to terms for the master-slave relationship, whose debut comes unexpectedly late in the novel: οἰκέτης, ‘house-servant’, first at 2.12; δουλεύω, ‘I am a slave’, first at 2.23; δοῦλος, ‘slave’, first at 3.31; δέσποινα, ‘mistress’, first at 3.25; δεσπότης, ‘master’, first at 3.26. It argues that a significant parallel (hinted at by the comparison between the obedience of Daphnis’ goats and that of οἰκέται to their master’s command at 4.15.4) should be seen between different relations of dominance – sheep and goats dominated by shepherds and goatherds; slaves and people of low rank dominated by members of Greek city elites – and that this parallel prompts readers to contemplate the control exercised by Rome over the Greek world and its city elites. Such contemplation is invited by the analogy between Longus’ story of a couple suckled by animals and that of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf, and by his choice of name for the couple’s son, Philopoemen, that of a historical character whom Plutarch says some Roman called ‘the last of the Greeks’.

This chapter explores the ways in which the five novels diverge in their representation of sounds. Chariton seems well aware of what can be achieved by briefly-sketched sound effects, but brief sketches are all we get: he does not suggest that the written word might find it hard to convey varieties of sound. Xenophon is apparently not concerned to communicate sound effects at all. Achilles Tatius offers elaborate rhetoric and sometimes striking imagery in compensation for the written word’s inability to render sound. Both Longus and Heliodorus push their readers (in different ways) to reflect on the problem of communicating sound, each offering a different solution. That of Heliodorus for the representation of sung poetry is a striking advance on anything in the earlier novels, apparently learning from (but also upstaging) Philostratus’ Heroicus.

This chapter argues that in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, the depictions in the inset tales of male self-assertion and sexual violence are offered not as models which we may expect Daphnis to imitate (as suggested e.g. by Winkler) but as contrasts to his reciprocal and considerate relationship with Chloe.

This chapter argues that in Theocritus Idyll 7 Lycidas falls into none of the categories listed by Dover in his 1971 commentary (ostensibly a comprehensive list) but into a category he had overlooked, that of a fictional character from another poet’s work. This other poet, I suggest, was Philitas of Cos, whose very influential early Hellenistic poetry is known only from a few fragments and from later allusions and references. Among the many things explained by this hypothesis (and it remains only a hypothesis) are the Coan setting of Idyll 7’s narrative and the erotodidactic role of Philetas in Longus. The ‘Cydonia’ given as Lycidas’ origin becomes a Cydonia some kilometres north of Mytilene on Lesbos, arguably the hill-flanked coastal plain where Longus asks readers to imagine the estates on which Daphnis and Chloe pastured goats and sheep.

The first part of this chapter explores the effects achieved by Heliodorus in his naming of his characters – among them the unusual name Cnemon from Menander’s Dyscolus chosen to underline the features of his story that related closely to New Comedy, and the philosophically resonant name Aristippus for his pleasure-seeking father. The second part argues that Heliodorus’ detailed description (5.14) of the pastoral ‘theatre’ represented on the amethyst given to the merchant Nausicles in exchange for Charicleia was calculated to remind readers of Longus, in particular of the scene where Dionysophanes, Cleariste and their retinue seated ‘as a theatre’ spectate Daphnis’ goats responding obediently to his panpipe’s commands (4.15.2–4). Heliodorus invites his readers to contrast the miniature and rustic world of Longus with his own vast and densely populated canvas – and incidentally offers an argument for putting his novel later than that of Longus.

This chapter argues that Longus highlights important features of his work that contrast with tragedy. The preface’s intertexts with Antigone and Hippolytus are crucial. The latter focuses attention on how to manage ἔρως, alerting us to differences in its presentation by Longus and by tragedians. The inset tales’ myths – divine lust leading to a young woman’s destruction or metamorphosis – present a story-type drawn upon by Attic tragedy and more generally by Greek narrative poetry. In confining destructive ἔρως to his inset tales, explicitly called μῦθοι, ‘myths’, Longus contrasts gods’ actions and mortals’ sufferings in traditional myths with their handling in his own story. Tragedy neither explores stories of mutual and symmetrical desire, nor presents positive images of female desire, both of which are crucial to the discourse of the novels. Longus plants a clue to this verdict on tragedy at 4.17.2, where Astylus, expressing surprise at Gnathon’s wish to have sex with a goatherd, ὑπεκρίνετο τὴν τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν μυσάττεσθαι, ‘acted out revulsion at the foul smell of goats’: the dramatic term ὑπεκρίνετο alerts the reader to the double entendre in τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν, which with the addition of the iota subscript often omitted in imperial Greek epigraphic and papyrus texts becomes τραγικὴν δυσωιδίαν, ‘the unpleasant singing of tragedy’.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

This chapter discusses the absence from Longus of institutionalised community religion and of one of its central elements, priests, who (like priestesses) are found in the other four novels. A reason for this might be that some rural cults ran themselves and thus differed from polis-based religion. The only character within the story eligible for description as a holy man is Philetas: he has a very close relationship with Eros, who watches over him. The story’s narrator, however, relates in the preface how a shadowy exegetes explained the paintings in the Nymph’s grove: yet this exegetes, on whose say-so the novel’s four books are offered, lacks authority. Longus reverses the novelistic trope of supporting his story by a Beglaubigungsapparat: instead his exegetes’ interpretations of the painting’s scenes leave the reader quite uncertain about the reality of their world.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

The Introduction sketches the content of the book’s forty-six chapters in varying degrees of detail and relates them to the author’s developing interests and, in the case of imperial Greek poetry and the Greek novels, to the increasing scholarly attention given to these subjects over the last thirty-five years.

This chapter observes that Longus promotes an αἰπόλος, ‘goatherd’, to bear the privileged name Daphnis, transferring his canonical role of βουκόλος, ‘cowherd’, to other herdsmen – something easily done, since all play the syrinx. But Longus’ Daphnis does not inherit the capacity of the Theocritean αἰπόλος for singing mellifluous song: whereas Chloe does sing sola, Longus’ males, including Daphnis, do not, except for the cowherd in the inset tale at 1.27 and Philetas in his recollections at 2.3.2: instead they tell μῦθοι, ‘myths’. It suggests that Longus might have envisaged his own, often poetic, prose achieving what song had achieved for Theocritus’ Polyphemus, and that his elimination of male solo song was part of his programme of refashioning Sappho and Theocritus in prose. It is noted that of the three characters to whom, from a Theocritean Daphnis, the status of βουκόλος is transferred, Dorcon twice saves Daphnis, but his understanding of eros does not advance the couple’s; that of the βουκόλος Philetas does, and his advice is important; Lampis’ impact, however, like Dorcon’s, is ephemeral, and his character unpleasant. Despite Philetas’ positive role, Dorcon’s and Lampis’ actions may hint that Theocritus was wrong to privilege βουκόλοι, who in Longus can be boisterous and self-assertive, and that a society which gave cowherds free rein would be rougher than one in which standards of behaviour were set by goatherds and shepherds.

The chapter’s first objective is to give a flavour of the post-classical vocabulary in Longus’ artistic prose and to determine at what literary level the authors with whom he shares such vocabulary locates him. After noting some hapax legomena, and documenting some fifty words and a score of usages first found in post-classical literary texts ranging from Epicurus to Himerius, I concluded that, while these were only a sub-class of the numerous cases of vocabulary and usage that Longus shares with post-classical authors, they showed that, while Longus does himself often Atticise, he does so much less consistently than other Atticising writers of the late second and early third centuries. In some respects, then, his linguistic behaviour can be seen as analogous to that of Chariton. whose vocabulary matches that of several writers of the first century AD. But though writing in a period when Atticism was gaining strength, and may well have been prominent in some places, Chariton does not follow this path: a century and a half later Longus was writing in a world where some lexicographers and sophists both preached and tried to practise hard-core Atticism; but he himself blends Atticist and post-classical usage without apparent concern. It is conceded that the data marshalled could not establish a firm date for Longus’ writing, but it is suggested they point to the 220s or 230s AD.