Clare Kearns, Brown University
In Longus’ 2nd century BCE novel Daphnis and Chloe, the boundaries between humans and animals are porous. Both protagonists are suckled by animals (a goat and a sheep) in infancy; one character, Dorcon, disguises himself as a wolf in an attempt to rape Chloe; and most notably, the humans who populate Longus’ bucolic setting often compare one another to animals, making sense of human interactions and status through observation of the animals around them (Bowie 2005; Epstein 1995). This porosity, however, is not simply a result of the novel’s bucolic setting. Rather, the slippage between categories of human and animal serves to highlight and complicate how the characters are otherwise categorized as marginal (Bowie 2019). The interplay between animality and marginality is most striking in Daphnis’ agon with Dorcon at 1.16, in which the two vie for Chloe’s affections through a debate over their handsomeness relative to one another. This paper performs a close reading on the agon in order to show that, in Longus’ novel, animality becomes an index for social constructions of alterity: Dorcon tells Chloe that Daphnis is ‘black like a wolf’ while he himself is ‘white as milk,’ therefore warranting her affection (although Daphnis counters that Dorcon is ‘white like a city-woman’); he later compares Daphnis to animal again, suggesting that because he was suckled by a goat, he is no better than a goat-kid. Taking a cue from recent work done in the area of Critical Animal Studies (e.g., Freccero and Kim 2013), this paper will show that the simultaneous invoking of animality alongside skin phenotype in Longus’ novel suggests processes of dehumanization akin to those which serve as the foundation for modern racism (Kim 2016). Longus, however, complicates this ostensibly fixed relationship between dark skin and animality through the introduction of sex and gender to the equation. For while Daphnis is ‘black like a wolf,’ Dorcon is the one who ultimately disguises himself as a wolf for the purpose of raping Chloe. The performance of ‘white as milk’ Dorcon as a wolf undermines the dark skin/animal construct he himself has set up; simultaneously, it puts his sexual threat in direct comparison to the threat the nearby she-wolf poses to Daphnis and Chloe’s Οocks, giving further weight to Daphnis’ accusation of Dorcon’s womanly character. Indeed, later, it will be a city-woman, Lykaenion (‘little wolf,’ cf. Epstein 1995: 61) who first transgresses the sexual chastity of the protagonists. The agon of Daphnis and Chloe sets up a number of binaries along gendered, raced, and specied lines, only to later complicate them: though Dorcon associates dark skin with animality, it transpires that the lighter-skinned contestant poses the more ‘animal’ threat to Chloe. Meanwhile, it appears that in this novel, animality is more closely associated with femininity – a trait more associated with the lighter-skinned characters – than with masculinity, further problematizing Dorcon’s pronouncement. Longus thus blurs any neat distinctions between animal/human, dark skin/light skin, and male/female that his characters would otherwise draw.