50 pages • 1 hour read
LongusDaphnis and Chloe
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4 Summary
News comes that Lamon’s master will soon arrive. Lamon begins preparing the estate, referred to as a “pleasure-ground”, ahead of his master’s visit. Daphnis also makes sure that the goats are ready for inspection, providing the animals with great care and attention, hoping to impress his master and gain permission to marry Chloe. Eudromus, a messenger, arrives to instruct the slaves to pick grapes and make wine ahead of the master’s arrival. Daphnis befriends the messenger by presenting him with gifts.
However, all the efforts to impress the master are thwarted by Lampis, a local cowherd who is also in love with Chloe. Driven by jealousy, Lampis vandalizes the pleasure-ground and tramples the beautiful flowers, leaving Daphnis and his family devastated. Eudromus returns and alerts the slaves that their master’s son will arrive in three days, with his father following later. When Eudromus learns of the vandalism, he advises Daphnis’s family to be honest with the young master.
The master’s son, Astylus, arrives with his “parasite” companion, Gnathon, and Lamon explains about the estate’s vandalism. Feeling sorry for the slaves, Astylus offers to tell his father that his horses trampled the flowers, much to Lamon’s relief. Astylus departs but Gnathon stays on, drinking and reveling. Gnathon is a “pederast by temperament” (70), and tries to rape Daphnis when he rejects his advances. Although Daphnis fights Gnathon off, the parasite continues to hope Astylus will gift him the goatherd and allow him to satisfy his desires.
Dionysophanes (Lamon’s master and Astylus’s father) arrives with his wife, Cleariste. Daphnis impresses the couple by playing his pipes and demonstrating how he can control the goats with the instrument. Meanwhile, Gnathon say he will kill himself if he can’t have Daphnis, and Astylus promises Gnathon that he will see if it is possible to take Daphnis with them. Daphnis discovers the plan and is horrified—his first thought is to run away or convince Chloe to die by suicide with him. Lamon and Myrtale decide to intercede by revealing to the master and his family that Daphnis is not their birth son. Lamon explains to Dionysophanes that the tokens left with Daphnis indicate he is from wealthy parents and therefore, cannot be taken as a slave.
When Dionysophanes and Cleariste examine the tokens, they are amazed to realize that they are the objects that they abandoned with their own baby boy after their family became too large. The couple are overjoyed to be reunited with their son, who they believed to be dead, and Daphnis is welcomed into the family. Dionysophanes gifts Daphnis the land and farm on which he had been raised, effectively freeing Lamon and Myrtale from servitude. A feast is organized to celebrate the discovery of Daphnis’s identity and Daphnis dedicates his herdsman’s tools to the gods.
Chloe, learning of Daphnis’s elevated status, is devastated—she believes Daphnis will want to marry a rich woman instead of her. Spotting his opportunity, Lampis the cowherd re-appears and carries Chloe off, convinced that Dryas will welcome him as a son-in-law now that Daphnis will surely not want to marry Chloe. When Daphnis discovers what has happened, he is overcome and laments aloud. Gnathon overhears Daphnis’s distress and, seeking an opportunity to put things right with him, leads a group of men to rescue Chloe. The mission is successful and Gnathon returns Chloe to Daphnis, who forgives his “parasite-benefactor” (80).
Daphnis and Chloe plan to marry in secret. However, Dryas decides to also reveal the circumstances of Chloe’s abandonment and takes the tokens she was left with to Dionysophanes and Cleariste, who accept Chloe as a suitable match for Daphnis. Following lots of celebrations, Dionysophanes and Cleariste return to Mytilene with Daphnis and Chloe, who are greeted with adoration by the townspeople. One evening, Dionysophanes dreams that the nymphs are begging Eros for Daphnis to marry Chloe. Eros agrees and commands Dionysophanes to organize a banquet and invite all the nobles from Mytilene. At the banquet, Eros instructs Dionysophanes to show every guest the tokens left with Chloe when she was abandoned as a baby. Dionysophanes does as the god commands and one of the guests at the feast, Megacles, recognizes the tokens as those he abandoned with his baby daughter when he was suffering a period of economic hardship. Dionysophanes calls for Chloe and reunites her with Megacles, her birth father, and Rhoda, her birth mother.
The next day, the whole party sets off for the countryside, where the young lovers marry surrounded by both their birth and adoptive families, as well as many friends and well-wishers. The narrative flashes forward and reveals that following their marriage—and despite their new wealth—Daphnis and Chloe spend much of their time in the countryside, maintaining the rustic traditions that they were raised with. The couple also go on to have a son named Philopoemen and a daughter called Agele. Returning to the day of their marriage, the novel concludes on Daphnis and Chloe’s wedding night, when they make love for the first time.
Book 4 Analysis
Book 4 contains the novel’s most troubling scenes, with both Daphnis and Chloe being threatened with rape. In Greek culture, rape was a reoccurring motif in mythology, literature, and art. The rape of women was especially prominent in mythology, with gods frequently pursuing and violating goddesses, nymphs, and mortal women. The rape of men or boys was less commonly portrayed, although a notable example is Zeus’s pederastic abduction of Ganymede.
The reason Daphnis is vulnerable to rape is linked to his social status, as he and his adoptive family are slaves. Gnathon says Daphnis has “the body of a slave, but the beauty of a free man” (74), as though beauty and being a slave are mutually exclusive. Here, the reference to Daphnis having a slave’s body also objectifies him, reducing him to an inanimate article that can be owned. Gnathon does not think his assault on Daphnis is morally wrong, because he does not view him as an autonomous agent. Rather, as a slave, Daphnis is subject to the whims of his masters and social superiors. When Gnathon is preparing to make advances towards Daphnis, he “anticipated no problems in getting his way with a mere goatherd” (70). Here, the phrase “mere goatherd” emphasizes that Gnathon sees Daphnis as his inferior and views his occupation as insignificant. Even Astylus asks Gnathon: “Wasn’t he ashamed of being in love with Lamon’s son, and did he really want to go to bed with a boy who herded goats?” (74). Despite Longus presenting Astylus as just, through his protection of Lamon from blame for the pleasure ground’s vandalism, the young master only objects to Gnathon’s intentions based on Daphnis’s station, rather than the immorality of his companion’s actions.
This book also explores the reasons for infant exposure, another reoccurring theme in Greek mythology. In practice, abandoning a child in a wild place was tantamount to infanticide, and Longus chooses realistic reasons for why his parental characters resorted to such measures. Dionysophanes abandoned Daphnis because his “family was big enough” (78), while Megacles exposed Chloe because he was going through a time of economic hardship and “wasn’t eager to bring up the child in poverty” (83). Both these instances suggest the families would have struggled to raise additional children, which was the main reason why children were exposed in the ancient Greek world. However, Longus also weaves in the way exposure appears in myth and its association with heroic origins—Oedipus was one of the most notable mythological figures to be exposed as an infant. Therefore, Daphnis and Chloe’s abandonment as babies, their subsequent discovery by simple herdsmen, and the regular intervention of the gods to keep them safe, suggest that they were always fated to live unusual lives. The revelation of the pair’s origins fulfils the prediction made by their adoptive parents at the start of the novel—that Daphnis and Chloe had the “promise of a higher destiny” (7).
The revelation of Daphnis and Chloe’s true identities is the penultimate stage of their character arc and cements the theme of Growing Up and Loss of Innocence as of central importance to the novel. Following their reunion with their respective birth parents, the two young people cast off belongings from their old lives, as they look to embrace the opportunities offered by their new lives. Daphnis gathers “all his herdsman’s tackle and divide[s] it into lots, for dedication to the gods” (79). Meanwhile, Chloe “dedicate[s] her own gear—her panpipes, her haversack, her goatskin, and her milk pails” (82). This dedication of personal items that the pair used in their rural lives symbolizes that they are leaving their childhood pursuits and identities behind. It is not, however, a rejection of rural life. Tracing the theme of Urban Life and Country Idylls to its conclusion, the couple return to the countryside for their wedding and spend much of their married lives there, having “not tak[en] kindly to life in the town” (84). Once Daphnis and Chloe have discovered and understood their heritage, they can establish new identities as husband and wife, simultaneously completing their character arcs.
The novel ends with Daphnis and Chloe making love for the first time, finally overcoming the difficulties of Navigating Love and Lust by consummating their relationship: “Daphnis and Chloe lay down naked together, wrapped their arms about each other, and began to kiss; and the amount of time they spent awake that night would have put even little owls in the shade” (85-86). The emotional closeness of the lovers is reflected in the physical joining of their bodies, whilst the reference to the owls and to the fact that “Daphnis did a thing or two that Lycaenion had taught him” (86), is a wry authorial acknowledgement that events have come to their natural conclusion. Longus also shows the couple living a long, happy, bucolic life—just as the gods always seem to have intended.
