Daphne & Chloë

Philetas, a wise old cowherd, explains to them what love is and tells them that the only cure is kissing. Eventually, Lycaenion, a woman from the city, educates Daphnis in love-making. Daphnis, however, decides not to test his newly acquired skill on Chloe, because Lycaenion tells Daphnis that Chloe "will scream and cry and lie bleeding heavily [as if murdered].

She is also carried off by raiders from a nearby city and saved by the intervention of the god Pan. Meanwhile, Daphnis falls into a pit, gets beaten up, is abducted by pirates, and is very nearly raped. In the end, Daphnis and Chloe are recognized by their birth parents, get married, and live out their lives in the country. Until the beginning of the 19th century, about a page of text was missing; when Paul Louis Courier went to Italy, he found the missing part in one of the plutei of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence.

Unfortunately, as soon as he had copied the text, he upset the ink-stand and poured ink all over the manuscript. The Italian philologists were incensed, especially those who had studied the pluteus giving "a most exact description" un'esattissima notizia of it. The first vernacular edition of Daphnis and Chloe was the French version of Jacques Amyot , published in Along with the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor published in the same year , Daphnis and Chloe helped inaugurate a European vogue for pastoral fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Jacques Amyot's French translation is perhaps better known than the original. The story has been presented in numerous illustrated editions, including a limited edition with woodcuts by Aristide Maillol , and a edition illustrated by Marc Chagall. Another translation that rivals the original is that of Annibale Caro , one of those writers dearest to lovers of the Tuscan elegances. The film The Princess Bride contains similarities to Daphnis and Chloe for example, in both stories the male romantic lead is captured by pirates.

The work was adapted into a minute radio play in by Hattie Naylor. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the genus of moth, see Myrtale moth.

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For the plant genus, see Myrtales. For other uses, see Daphnis and Chloe disambiguation. Nov 04, Benji rated it it was amazing Shelves: Things like this make me lament the difference in curriculum between what I studied in school in the US and what my friend studied in Italy in Lecce. At least I'm aware that I missed out, and so I have to fill in the gaps! The way I do so is through this: And as an American, how would we have had exposure to this, unless some Hollywood film company decides to make a new iteration of it? Without that kind of leverage behind it, it's not something that would ever come again ever onto the Bestseller list even if it is better than the majority of those books there.

Listening to a great episode of RADIOLAB ''Words'' about how a language spontaneously grew among the deaf community in Nicaragua, and how the second generation had 10x more subtle words for the idea of ''to think'', with the result that they scored many orders better on a test that examined their ability to have strong interpersonal empathy. To me, this says a lot about the influence and evolution of literature, even the use and function of it. Furthermore, larger vocabulary literally is empowering in a very concrete way, and that applies also to the way words are used and the kind of constantly evolving complexity in the spiritual field of the different worlds created by good literature.

You can become more human by reading books. In the program, the man says the 27 years when he was deaf and languageless -- not even knowing until then that objects had names that people used -- were his dark years, and once he had the growing vocabulary, he was less and less able to remember what he felt then before his first teacher opened him up, and was never able to interact in the same way with his other languageless friends because he could no longer think in a way that was intelligible to his friends.

So with this in mind, I open a Penguin Classic and I wonder, how far removed am I from the way this writer understands his world?

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And its a tricky thing, especially in this instance. Longus wrote the amazing Daphnis and Chloe years ago. Which in Greek antiquity time, is the end of Greek antiquity time. Its surprising that it doesn't feel dated.

It isn't overly elaborate, but neither is it extremely simplistic. The writer really seems to have thought about the arc of the story, when to bring or when to pull the emotional punches. Things are mentioned that have an impact dozens of pages later, there's a good economy of words, but the author also is able to elaborate when necessary rather than rushing the story.

I read it in about 3 hours, and didn't once have my attention wander. I meant to read half last night and half today but I liked it enough that I kept going until AM. It's worth your time! It easily rivaled any other classical text that I've come across. I've not really read a lot from this time, but have enjoyed nearly everything that I've come across. Other Antiquities classics that I love: People make a great to-do about Euripides, but I read a thing about him that was pretty scathing and have stayed away from him. Plus there are many good Shakespeare plays that incorporate these characters.

This is the intro text on GR from the Marc Chagal version: In Goethe called Daphnis and Chloe 'a masterpiece One would do well to read it every year, to be instructed by it again and again, and to receive anew the impression of its great beauty. Lovers of European culture. I would give it one more star if I could see in any way its relevance to the twenty-first century.

The adolescent,real pure love,the discovery of sensuality,the birth of sexuality,the exploration of one another body,is one of the most beautiful and tender events in the life of a human being;yet no ever happens and if it do, mostly only one time, and by that is a intemporal subject of novels and poetry. This pastoril bucolic novel ,written in Adrianos time,located in the Lesbos island ,near the turkish coast,tells all this with a lot of references to grek mithology and with happy end. Is strikin The adolescent,real pure love,the discovery of sensuality,the birth of sexuality,the exploration of one another body,is one of the most beautiful and tender events in the life of a human being;yet no ever happens and if it do, mostly only one time, and by that is a intemporal subject of novels and poetry.

Is striking in this novel not contamined with the christian or at least catholic concept of sexual morality,the exquisite delicacy in describing the sexuality, mostly by using metaphores and ellipses,also is striking,or no so much in that time, the natural treatment of homosexuality and the value of virginity. Is a beautiful novel ,permeated by inocence ,ingenuity and simplicity. The arquetipe of the coming bucolic or not, adolescent love novels. I am thinking that perhaps this novel has influenced another classic novel over adolescent love,Paul and Virginie by Bernardine Saint Pierre,similar in circustances and environement,yet here there are not,in some way obvious, sexual references nor happy end Uno dei primi romanzi, scritto nel III secolo d.

Cresceranno insieme e si innamoreranno, dovendo superare qualche ostacolo prima di poter consumare. E bisogna ammette Uno dei primi romanzi, scritto nel III secolo d.

E bisogna ammettere che ne scriveva meglio lui nel III secolo d. Oct 05, Katherine Hislop rated it it was ok Shelves: Like a fairytale minus the fun stuff. Aug 01, John Pistelli rated it really liked it Shelves: This early pastoral romance dating from the second or third century A. Moreover, the voice of the narrator, self-conscious about narrating a winsome erotic pastoral, radiates a faint but persistent irony that I think of as the essence of the novelistic Bakhtin, though he didn't like Greek romances, argued that the novel as a form relativizes and ironizes all of the languages that make it up, and Longus, who is highly allusive according to this edition's introduction, does this ably: And to ensure that the child's name should sound adequately pastoral, they decided to call him Daphnis.

Daphnis and Chloe are each found as babies by poor farmers in Lesbos and are reared to be a goatherd and a shepherdess, respectively, by their foster parents under the influence of prophetic dreams. The pair, working side by side every day as they drive the sheep and the goats, fall innocently in love.

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Gradually, they discover their erotic desire for each other; though, as they live before sex ed or Internet porn, they do not know what to do about it. Eventually, Daphnis is instructed with maximal explicitness by a bored, predatory housewife in the vicinity who wants to fuck the beautiful boy any way she can and ends up doing so under the cover of pedagogy.

Their relationship is threatened by war and pirates, but our amorous pair are under the protection of the gods, particularly Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan, and are consequently always reunited. By the end of the novel, more mundane challenges interfere with their love, and we seem almost to pass in ten pages from the silly pseudo-Homeric adventures of Greek romance to the more mature complications of a Jane Austen: Daphnis, whose foster-father is a slave, may be too low-status to marry the more privileged Chloe; moreover, the slave-master is returning to survey his property, and there is the danger that he will dispose of Daphnis or else allow him to be taken on as a kind of sex-slave by the pederast Gnathon.

Happily, everyone discovers before the end that the foundlings Daphnis and Chloe are in fact the abandoned children of important or wealthy families and can thus properly marry each other as social elites. They remain committed to their pastoral lifestyle, however, and the novel ends happily with their finally making love. There is a mythical armature to Daphnis and Chloe ; as mentioned, the lovers are under the protection of Eros, Pan, and the Nymphs, while the slave-master who comes to survey the property on which the amorous pair disport themselves is named Dionysophanes, or the manifestation of Dionysus.

Margaret Anne Doody, in her vast study, The True Story of the Novel , argues for the continuity of the novel from Greek romance to today as an urbane feminist form of literature in contradistinction to the masculinist epic and tragedy; she interprets Daphnis and Chloe as a an allegory for the erotic potential of equal partnership. In a world where Dionysius has "sold out to Big Business" by becoming a property- and slave-owner, the pastoral couple under the sponsorship of Pan, representing male sexuality, and the Nymphs, representing female sexuality imperfectly prophesy the companionate marriage of intersubjective equals that will be described much later, by Doody's favorite novelist, Samuel Richardson.

This is an optimistic reading of Longus's ironic narrative, obviously colored by Doody's polemic against the Dionysius-worshipping Nietzsche, who scorned the Greek novel and the Hellenistic era as effeminate, decadent betrayals of the Greek tragic spirit. But in developing a lineage for the novel that goes back before Don Quixote and evades the airless Hegelian literary history that would lead us from Cervantes to the avant-garde end of narrative in an unbroken line of development, Doody's interpretation is suggestive and cheering.

And surely the other side of Nietzsche's personality, the one that sees "truth" as a contingent effect of rhetoric, might well be charmed by Longus's irony. In a preface, Longus casts his whole novel as an ekphrasis , or a verbal description of a visual art object: Both the novel's consciousness of its own artifice and its subtle modulation from the mythical divinities of love to the materialist determinations of property relations make it a fully-developed example of the novelist's art, as does the tonal richness of the prose, which can shift easily from limpid nature poetry to social satire, and which even includes proto-stream-of-consciousness narration as the lovers muse on their erotic confusions: Oh, what an unlucky victory!

Oh, what a strange disease—I don't even know what to call it. Had Chloe drunk poison just before she kissed me? If so, how did she manage not to be killed? Almost nothing is known of Daphnis and Chloe 's author; in translator Paul Turner's introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, he even notes that "Longus" may simply be a misprint from "Logos" meaning "story" on an early edition's title page, as contemporary novels are always subtitled "a novel"—maybe the effectively anonymous author is the multifarious spirit of fiction itself.

Picking up something that was written in the 2nd century is always going to bring with it some worries that it will be far too archaic to possibly understand or enjoy now. Credit therefore has to go to the translation done, in this edition, by Phiroze Vasunia for making this so utterly readable, even by modern standards. There wasn't a single point I felt the language or tone were outdated, confusing or dense, and the story itself was fun and charming, as we follow two young people who must go Picking up something that was written in the 2nd century is always going to bring with it some worries that it will be far too archaic to possibly understand or enjoy now.

There wasn't a single point I felt the language or tone were outdated, confusing or dense, and the story itself was fun and charming, as we follow two young people who must go up against the likes of pirates, jealous would-be suitors, extreme weather and Greek deities in their quest to understand their feelings for each other so they can be together. Oh, and there's an openly gay character and no one's really bothered about it, which is cool, but he's a sex pest, so, you know All-in-all, this was a surprisingly swift, pleasant and enjoyable read, full of olde-worlde humour and warmth.

Cresceram e tornaram-se ambos pastores do seu rebanho, mas acabavam partilhando e revezando muitas das tarefas. Apr 18, Julia rated it it was amazing. Aug 19, Barnaby Thieme rated it really liked it Shelves: One of the great ironies of world literature is that the sole extant novel by the Greek author Longus is actually quite short. Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system We've come a long way from Aeschylus and Homer, to this artful pastoral diversion writ One of the great ironies of world literature is that the sole extant novel by the Greek author Longus is actually quite short.

We've come a long way from Aeschylus and Homer, to this artful pastoral diversion written for city-dwellers who had never set foot in the country. In Longus' idyllic vision of the rural world, bees are all honey and no sting, and even the fearsome god Pan has been reduced to a character from the Beethoven sequence of Disney's Fantasia. The plot, such as it is, involves the star-crossed lovers Daphnis and Chloe as they stumble their way into love's mysteries and each others' arms, faced with minor trials of sub-Herculean scope, such as not understanding how one is to comport one's self in satisfying the needs of the body.

I couldn't help but think of the glorious pediment statue of the Archaic precursor to the Parthenon, housed in the Acropolis museum - a vivid and enormous depiction of a lion bringing down a bull. It remains one of the most powerful images of religious art I've yet seen, and I can only shake my head at the decline of insight and intensity that wound Greek culture down from that searing encounter with the heart of nature to this mere ornament, which has the insight and profundity of one of Mozart's comedies.

I was strongly reminded of von Eschenbach's Parsifal in his fool state, reading of Daphnis' proclivity to burst into tears whenever frightened or confused, and his stone-dull inability to reason through the basic facts of life. That said, it is a piece of its time, and reflects the anxieties and outlooks of the leisure class of late-period Hellenistic culture.

It is one of the world's first novels, and it attempts a psychology of sorts which is more amusing than persuasive. I can't speak for the quality of the translation, other than to my ears it landed as vernacular and a little clunky throughout. If there is lyricism in the original, that's where it mostly stayed.