to the relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have seen only the Hindoo K[=a]masutr[=a]m, the literal version of the Arabian Nights, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr. Boas, can compare with this “sweet and beautiful” romance of Longus in downright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness.  I have been able, without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, to give a fairly accurate idea of the love-affairs of savages and barbarians; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum up the story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond the limits of propriety.  Among all the deliberate pictures of moral depravity painted by Greek and Roman authors not one is so objectionable as this “idyllic” picture of the innocent shepherd boy and girl.  Pastoral love is coarse enough, in all truth:  but this story is infinitely more immoral than, for instance, the frank and natural sensualism of the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus.  Professor Anthon (755) described the story of Daphnis and Chloe as

“the romance, par excellence, of physical love.  It is a history of the senses rather than of the mind, a picture of the development of the instincts rather than of the sentiments.... Paul and Virginia is nothing more than Daphnis and Chloe delineated by a refined and cultivated mind, and spiritualized and purified by the influence of Christianity.”

This is true; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greek story “vice is advocated by no sophistry.”  On the contrary, what makes this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the sophistical veil of innocence.  Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story.  Professor Rohde (516) has rudely torn the veil from his sly sophistry: 

“The way in which Longus excites the sensual desires of the lovers by means of licentious experiments going always only to the verge of gratification, betrays an abominably hypocritical raffinement[331] which reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the naivete of this idyllist is a premeditated artifice and he himself nothing but a sophist.  It is difficult to understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so far as to overlook the sophistical character of this pastoral romance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine naivete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions.  No attentive reader who has some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the true inwardness of the story...  As this sophist, in those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, so, on the other hand, his eager desire to appear as simple and childlike as possible often enough makes him cold, finical, trifling, or utterly silly in his affectation."[332]

HERO AND LEANDER