Longus' Hyperreality: Daphnis and Chloe as a Meta-text about Mimesis and Simulation

The innovative theoretical input by Jean Baudrillard and Wolfgang Iser helps further elucidate the features of Longus' pastoral novel as an auto-referential and meta-poetic text based on the aesthetic ideas of the Second Sophistic. Thus, besides the simple love story, it is a highly sophisticated, self-conscious meta-text reflecting the relationship between image and text as well as mimesis as an intertextual repetition and palimpsestic practice. Most of all, Longus transforms mimesis to simulation and simulacrum, using them as literary devices to both mask his world and unmask the idealized internal perspective of the pastoral novel, i.e. bucolic escapism, mythic utopia, and romantic love as childish, naive, and hyperreal. This new reading of Daphnis and Chloe is a reappraisal of its ideology, highly innovative aesthetics, and poetics in ancient and (post)modern terms