Scholarship on Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe tends to center on eroticism or pastoralism or the interplay of the two in the infusion of Theocritean innocence into the Greek narrative prose tradition of heterosexual love. Although these approaches examine Longus’s careful construction of an eroticized pastoral world, they tend to overlook the reproduction and parenthood that also inform Longus’s pastoralism. This article argues that Longus’s pastoral landscapes, signaled chiefly by the locus amoenus, have a primarily reproductive rather than erotic function. These landscapes introduce parenthood and childcare as themes that, in turn, serve as metaphors for the creative process behind the novel itself. By shifting the focus to the reproductive and parental aspects of Daphnis and Chloe, I will illuminate a hybrid quality to Longus’s pastoralism that has not been fully explored but is a key aspect of his pastoral art.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid brings together Golden Age imagery with contrasting scenes of destruction, making this paradoxical amalgam a motif within his epic. This study connects Ovid’s use of Golden Age language to his portrayal of artistry in the poem, discovering that both within the stories of the epic and in Ovid’s poetic style, artistic creation is emphasised in the context of this motif. Both natural fecundity and artistic creation emerge after the flood through the principle of discors concordia (Met. 1.433), which involves the unity of divine harmony and chaos; this principle is central to Ovid’s use of Golden Age language. The discussion takes up the influence of Virgil and Lucretius on this motif, discovering that Ovid’s synthesis of harmony and chaos draws on both forerunners. By uniting the Golden Age and its antithesis, Ovid reveals the conditions necessary for art, and thus for poetry itself.