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The Origins of Daphnis Proceedings of the Virgil Society 21 (1993) 65-79 ©1993 The Origins of Daphnis Virgil's Eclogues and the Ancient Near East Daphnis is a figure of whom it is difficult to find the measure: we have the uncomfortable feeling, wherever we meet him, that the simple card­ board cut-out shepherds who lament for him from time to time such as Moeris or Lycidas or Thyrsis know far more about him than we do, and that it is difficult to account for him entirely in terms of the scattered Greek and Latin mentions of his name. In trying to trace some coherence behind his enigmatic appearances I hope to restore him to a context where he can shed more light on the background of the Eclogues as a whole. We meet Daphnis in Eclogues 5, 7 and 8 and 9, and he is implied in Eclogue 10. In the first of these Mopsus sings of the lament of the nymphs for Daphnis, the laments of his mother, nature, and the country gods, the wasting of nature, and Daphnis' own epitaph (43 £): 'Daphnis ego in siluis, hinc usque ad sidera notus formonsi pecoris custos, formonsior ipse'. Menalcas replies with an apotheosis of Daphnis: peace in the country­ side, Pan, Shepherds and Dryads, country rejoicing, singings and prancings. Daphnis has a more conventional role in Eclogue 7, where he invites Meliboeus to attend the traditional rustic singing-match be­ tween Corydon and Thyrsis. He also forms the content of Alphesiboeus' song in Eclogue 8: magical rites to summon back an unresponsive lover from the town with the repeated line ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin. The ashes, presumably of Daphnis' love, rekindle at last on the altar and Daphnis himself returns. The mourning for Daphnis seems to offer the 65 GRAHAM ANDERSON background to the mourning for Gallus in Eclogue 10, though here Daphnis himself is not mentioned by name. So who was Daphnis? And how does Virgil's handling of him fit into the overall picture? The mentions of his name in classical literature outside Virgil are frustratingly meagre: Theocritus provides further co­ ordinates, and it is both conventional and inevitable to link Virgil's version with the Daphnis of Theocritus Idyll 1 in particular. Here how­ ever there is a different dimension that Virgil seems to have ignored or suppressed: here too Daphnis is dying (in a song by Thyrsis), and is attended in succession by Hermes, the pastoral crew, Priapus, and Aphrodite; but the last accuses him (97 f., 100-104): KeXfTe 'TV QT\V rbv "Epurra Ka.Teixeo< Ad4>vi, Xuyi£etv ?j p' OUK avrbs "EpcoTos" im-' dpyaXew eXuyLx&ns";'— TCLV 8' Spa X" Ad<f>vi? TT0Ta(j.et|3eT0- "Ktiirpi (3apeXa, K{)T:pL ve[ieooa.T&, Kfrrrpi 8i>a"roTai.v amex&f\S, T\8T\ ydp (J>pdcr8xi vravB' aXioi> &p.p.i SeStiicav; Ad^vis KT\V 'At8a mKbv 'ioaerai dXyo? "Epam. And she said, 'So you boasted, Daphnis, that you would master love, now have you not yourself been mastered by bitter love?' Daphnis replied to her: 'Oppressive Love, vindictive love, love hateful to mortals, for already do you claim that all my suns have set? Even in Hades Daphnis will be a pain to love.' Theocritus' account leaves particular ambiguity over the death of Daphnis, and Aphrodite's reaction to it (1.138 ff.) rbv 8' 'A<f>poS(,Ta f^OeX' avopQ&oar Td ye \xav Xiva Trdvra XeXotTrei eK Moipav, x" Adcfwis1 e^a p6oi>. Aphrodite wanted to raise him; but all his thread from the Fates had run out, and Daphnis 'went river'. There seems to be general consensus that Daphnis has drowned, though that is by no means the only possibility. Otherwise Daphnis' appear­ ances are fugitive: a pastoral drama, Sositheus' Lityerses, in which 66 THE ORIGINS OF DAPHNIS Daphnis was apparenty rescued by Heracles, a tale of amorous misad­ venture found chiefly in Aelian's Varia Historia 10.18,2 and perhaps most frustrating of all, Longus' Pastoral Romance Daphnis and Chloe. Aelian's tale gives a glimpse of a larger background: Daphnis the cowherd some say was the lover of Hermes, others his son: he took his name from the following cirumstances: he was the offspring of a nymph, and was laid at birth in a laurel. They say that the cows he herded were the cattle of the sun, which Homer mentions in the Odyssey. And while Daphnis was grazing them in Sicily, a nymph fell in love with him and slept with him—he was good-looking and young and growing his first beard, ...and she made an agreement that he would sleep with no-one else, and told him that he was fated to lose his sight if he broke it. And they made an agreement over this with one another. Later a king's daughter fell in love with him, and when drunk he broke the agreement and slept with her: hence bucolic songs were first sung and had as their content his suffering over his eyes. The background of Daphnis is widened by a note of Servius ad Eel. 8.68: The name of Daphnis' love is given here as Pimplea: when she is captured by pirates he searches the whole world for her and finds her in Phrygia as a slave to king Lityerses, who challenges visitors to a reaping contest and then kills the losers. Heracles frees Daphnis from this danger by beheading the king, restoring Pimplea, and giving them the royal palace as a wedding gift. Longus' novel seems to draw on both these situations—the amorous oath and an episode of (rather more trivial) kidnap and rescue. Daphnis is a foundling, exposed as in Aelian, and suckled this time by a goat and made a goatherd. He makes a compact of everlasting fidelity with Chloe, which he swears by Pan and Chloe's sheep. Again he seems to break the compact by accident, when an older woman initiates him under a pretext of instruction from the nymphs; but there is no punishment by Chloe, who never finds out. And he has an adventure in which Chloe is kid­ napped by pirates of a sort and Pan, not Heracles, comes to the rescue; the tale ends, not as in Servius' outline with a royal palace, but certainly with a rise in the social world and a marriage of the couple. 67 GRAHAM ANDERSON What then do we have? A tragic and a comic tradition, which need not be incompatible. Daphnis is the epicentre of the pastoral world: his life is marred by tragic amorous adventure, followed by death and resurrec­ tion. That Daphnis was indeed a rustic deity in Sicily is also attested: this is not the wishful thinking of Menalcas' ditty, but is reported in both Diodorus (4.84) and Servius ad Eel. 5.20. The tradition also leaves room for a number of episodes in the life of the divine shepherd, and a number of variants of some of them. It seems clear enough that Daphnis should be regarded as what anthropologists would call a culture-hero: he presides over, or in some cases introduces, skills essential to or characteristic of mankind, in this case the art of pastoral song itself;3 and as so often he pays for such precocity sooner or later with a tragic end: one thinks of Orpheus, of the Scythian Anacharsis, or of the account of Aesop's death in the Life of Aesop. Is there any particular culture-hero to which he can be related? DUMUZI-DAPHNIS? Since the rise of Ancient Near Eastern studies in the nineteenth century it has at least been plausibly suspected that Theocritus' Daphnis did not spring fully-formed from the head of a Hellenistic poet. The religious evidence that the Ancient Near Eastern archetype of a dying pastoral or vegetation-god underlay a cult of Daphnis was easily accepted, if per­ haps over-confidently elaborated, by students of ancient religion and folklore.4 But the possibility of its application to Virgil was hampered by the literary conviction of ancient authorities and their successors, that Theocritus was the founder of Pastoral and could have no significant predecessor.5 Only in the 'seventies and 'eighties of this century has this conviction been challenged with any real hope of success. We now at least have a sufficiently large battery of Sumerian texts relating to a dying and renewing pastoral god to suggest to us a larger framework for Daphnis and his companions.6 The texts relate the relationships of Dumuzi and his consort Inanna, and the enlarged Dumuzi-cycle goes like this: Dumuzi and Inanna fall in love and marry in a sacred mar­ riage rite: Inanna makes a misadventure into the underworld, 68 THE ORIGINS OFDAPHNIS from which Dumuzi fails to retrieve her; in revenge for his apparent indifference she sends him down to the underworld as her substitute; the resultant mourning of the natural world brings about a compromise: he is to spend half his time in the underworld, and half with his sister Gestinanna. (Other sepa­ rate pastoral texts seem to fit in to the first part of this pattern, most notably a wooing contest between Dumuzi and the farmer Enkimdu for Innana herself.) But it is in the details of the mourning of Dumuzi that we come closest to the territory of the First Idyll and the Fifth Eclogue:7 Your small kids weep bitterly in the feeding-pen, Your motherless lambs [utter] bitter cries at the wall's encompassing base.
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