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Как придумать имя: "Дафнис и Хлоя"
The article discusses all the names of the characters in Daphnis and Chloe: their etymological meaning and relations to cultural, historical, and literary context, adding the epigraphic evidence as background. Both human dramatis personae, gods and mythological creatures are considered.
The pantheon of the novel is divided into gods and mythic creatures as decorative and rhetorical figures, and as objects of worship and divine characters who act and leave their stories to interact with the heroes (e. g. Pytis, Syrinx, Echo). Significant names are characteristic of most novels, but Daphnis and Chloe are distinguished by their total interpretability and systematic thoughtfulness of naming. We cannot submit any interpretative model for one character only, that is Lampis.
For most of these names, separate interpretations have already been suggested by researchers and commentators. Our study not only stresses the systematic interrelationship of all of them, but also shows, how the author’ s scale
of value and escapism was displayed with their help. Sharing the opinion of Longus as a member of the Roman noble family, who shy away from the power and strength of Rome we suggest that what Longus did was the continuation of the pastoral tradition consisting of stylization and idealization of a simple rural life as it existed for centuries in poetry and philosophy. Instead he created pastoral a genre. The pastoral is constituted not by the image of simplicitas, rural way of life, and closeness to nature. Its main feature is consistent mediation of essential contradictions of all sorts.
Daphnis and Chloe was a secondary literary myth that offered the reader a chance to be present at the place and time of the myth, and at the establishment of the ritual, to become “witness” of the myth-creating events that will form the myth and ritual in the future. In other words, the novel imitates a sacred legend telling how “a myth was made of a virgin,” how new cults of Eros the Shepherd and Pan the Warrior were established and a priestly dynasty of divine shepherds was created. Longus’ Roman restores the myth so consciously and ideologically that it turns out not to become a myth, but a new literary genre, continued in Europe, when the conflict of nature and culture starts anew.