The Education of Daphnis: Goats, Gods, the Birds and the Bees

Abstract

D URING THE 1990S A TREND DEVELOPED in research on Daphnis and Chloe, with the novel's central focus on the nature of sexuality receiving renewed examination.1 One aspect of the text that has yet to receive full attention in this regard, however, is the careful manner in which it marks human sexuality through a series of parallels as well as oppositions among human, animal, and divine. How, for example, are we to view the reflections and refractions of both the animal and the divine in Daphnis? In general, as Segal (1974: 291) has succinctly put it, civilization rests on a double opposition: man versus beast and man versus and, to be sure, the Greek world-view frequently draws upon a series of such antitheses.2 Nonetheless, Daphnis and Chloe works with these oppositions between human and animal on the one hand and human and divine on the other in a thoroughgoing, but rather unusual, way: the interplay of human, animal, and divine is rendered more complex because the text not only establishes oppositions between these spheres, but breaks down boundaries in such a way that mutual interpenetration occurs and all three come to resemble one another, especially in their similar reactions to Eros (see Philetas' account of the god's influence at 2.7). In this essay, I concern myself particularly with how the text situates Daphnis vis-a-vis both his goats and Pan, the goat-footed god, and the role these figures play in educating Daphnis about male sexuality as both positive and negative exempla: what precisely will Daphnis learn from an environment that contains the potential for both pastoral harmony and bestial aggression? First of all, we should note that Daphnis, perhaps as much as any character in Greek literature, is portrayed as virtually belonging to the animal realm himself.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.