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.

This chapter traces the different uses of the term φοῖνιξ / Φοῖνιξ, the cognate adjectives φοινικός and φοινικοβαφής, and verb φοινίττω, running from this last’s allusive use to describe Theagenes’ bloodstained cheek at the beginning of Book 1 to the revelation at the novel’s close that its writer is a Φοῖνιξ, ‘Phoenician’. Ι noted how these uses span the word’s range of meanings – crimson, date, palm, Phoenician – and how Phoenicia’s importance is augmented by the mysteriously unnamed Tyrian’s victory at Delphi and by the description of the ship on which the trio escape as Φοινίκιον … φιλοτέχνημα, ‘a Phoenician masterpiece’ (5.18), a mis-en-abyme of the literary masterpiece which transports the couple from Delphi to Meroe.

This chapter offers arguments for dating Chariton between AD 41 and AD 62, Ninus between AD 63 and ca. AD 75, and Xenophon after AD 65. It suggests that the stylistic similarity of Metiochus and Parthenope to Chariton might point to proximity in date. I canvas a date between AD 98 and AD 130 for Antonius Diogenes, who might, like Chariton and the author of the Ninus, hail from Aphrodisias. Finally for Achilles Tatius I propose a date no later than AD 160. My footnotes in this volume take account of some important data from recently published papyri and of the valuable contribution of Henrichs 2011.

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 discusses two Theocritean poems. In Idyll 7 it proposes that the change from the unqualified name Amyntas at line 2 to ὁ καλὸς Ἀμύντιχος ‘the lovely dear Amyntas’ at line 132 signals a development in the narrator’s feelings for Amyntas from friendship to sexual desire. Concerning Idyll 6, it suggests that the roles assumed by the cowherds Daphnis and Damoetas in their quasi-competitive songs – that of praeceptor amoris to Polyphemus and that of Polyphemus replying – are used by them to reveal to each other their mutual desire, brought out into the open by their kiss (line 42) and by the ensuing miniature fête champêtre. It notes too that the poem’s address to Aratus leaves it open to him to interpret its exploration of hitherto unconfessed desire as bearing on his own relationship with the poet.

This chapter introduces important distinctions between intended and actual readership, and between the early novels, the ‘sophistic’ novels, and other known novels. It concludes that both the intended and actual readers of ‘sophistic’ novels were from the educated elite, and that Chariton probably envisaged such readers too, while perhaps writing in such as way that readers might also be found further down the social scale. Readers of this sort may also have been envisaged by Xenophon and some other writers of fiction, but in no case much further down.

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 explores links between Antonius Diogenes and Petronius. It notes features shared between ‘The incredible things beyond Thule’ and the Satyrica: their twenty-four-book format, their element of comedy, the location and extent of their characters’ travels, and the types of incident they encountered. Of three possibilities – that Antonius Diogenes knew the Satyrica, that the author of the Satyrica knew Antonius Diogenes, and that both drew on a common source – it suggests that the first, entailing Antonius Diogenes’ knowledge of Latin, is least likely. The second option would place ‘The incredible things beyond Thule’ ca. AD 55, shortly after the publication of Chariton’s Callirhoe and before that of Petronius’ Satyrica. As to the third possibility, although on Jensson’s hypothesis of a lost Greek original for the Satyrica some of the novels’ shared features might derive from a Milesian-tale narrative, the pursuit of the hero and his companion by a powerful and vengeful force, the death of the arch-villain, and the location in the bay of Naples and south Italy have no parallel in any known Greek ‘low’ narratives.

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 refutes Dover’s arguments that anachronisms and an unstageable change of speaker demonstrate the text of the (second) Clouds that we have to be an incomplete revision, intended as a text only for reading, not for performance.

This chapter argues that, whereas many poets in the Garland of Philip never use Doric, several do so to evoke either a Leonidean or Theocritean pastoral world, and sometimes because their subject has a Dorian connection – so Myrinus, Adaeus, Thallus, Erucius of Cyzicus, and Antiphilus of Byzantium. That Cyzicus was originally a colony of Corinth and Byzantium of Megara seems not to be relevant, since Doric appears only rarely in these cities’ inscribed poetry. Finally I examine the puzzling case of the five epigrams on Sacerdos of Nicaea preserved in the Palatine Anthology (15.4–8), of which three use Doric, two do not. I suggest that more than one poet may have been chosen to composed sepulchral epigrams for this grandiose obelisk-monument of around AD 130, and that the composer of the Doric poems might have been Philostratus’ ancestry-conscious sophist, Memmius Marcus of Byzantium

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.

This chapter charts the knowledge of Apollonius Rhodius shown in imperial Greek literature, where there are fewer references in prose writers than might be expected for so prominent a poet, but much exploitation of his language by hexameter poets, above all by Dionysius Periegetes.