ABSTRACT

The most famous Ancient Greek romance, Daphnis and Chloe, is set on the island of Lesbos, in a pastoral landscape just outside of Mytilene. Thus, the author of Daphnis and Chloe would have been roughly a contemporary of Lucian, but his Lesbos could not be farther from the home of man-faced women, about whom Lucian wrote, the ones who do not like to suffer it from men, but consort with women as though they were men. The novel opens with an anonymous narrator describing a painting in a grove of the nymphs that he once saw when hunting on Lesbos. Longus' generic manipulation serves to emphasize the association of the narrative with its Lesbian location. Emphatically set in this Lesbian locale, the narrative describes the erotic education of Daphnis and Chloe. The two of them fall in love, discover their elite identities, get married, and, most importantly, finally figure out how to do it.