Natura e artificio nel romanzo pastorale 'Dafni e Cloe' di Longo Sofista

The two protagonists of Longus’ novel live in perfect symbiosis with nature and its seasonal cycles, imitating the behavior of animals and having very little contact with the outside world. This is in accord with the ideology that sees reflected in the bucolic world the auroral situation of a still virgin humanity, prior to urbanization, when the main activity was pastoralism (see, for example, the history of humanity, with the bucolic fresco of the «sylvester genus ... terrigenarum», in the fifth book of Lucretius’ De rerum natura). In the course of the story, however, the important role of techne emerges more and more distinctly: it can integrate and perfect nature, completing it, not in an oppositional relationship, but in a harmonious combination.