ABSTRACT
Longus’ representation of slavery is set in the context of his representation of nature and art. The natural world, the bucolic paradise in which Daphnis and Chloe live, is also a place of a struggle to survive and procreate. This struggle produces a natural hierarchy: wolf over lamb, human over beast, man over woman. Art, or technē, mitigates, tames, and aestheticizes the violence and chaos of nature, enhancing the beauty that also exists there. Slavery is a culturally transformed manifestation of the domination that exists in nature; in this case, a Protagorean politikē technē involving mastery mitigates the domination natural to slavery and allows Daphnis to experience his slavery as a kind of mythos in which his life could be full of love and pleasure despite its hard work, scarcity, and occasional peril. In his benign depiction of Daphnis’ slavery, Longus has created an ideological antigraphē, a response, to earlier novels such as Ephesiaca and Callirhoe, whose protagonists’ experience of slavery was violent and traumatic. At the same time, the artificiality of the Longan mythos left open the possibility some ancient readers could have been led to question the nature of existing power relations.
