Longus seems to have left no trace of himself in antiquity. There are no papyri and no certain allusions to his novel before the Byzantine period, though some critics have found relationships with contemporary literary or artistic production, often in connection with the question of dating—for example post-Pompeian wall painting, Alkiphron, Lucian, Heliodorus—but the evidence is inconclusive (see Hunter 1983, 6–13). The first explicit reference appears in Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charicles, a long verse-romance of the twelfth century: in 6.439–450, the author names Daphnis and Chloe and gives a brief résumé of their story; he also paraphrases portions of Longus’ proem (356–377), Daphnis’ monologue (1.18), and Philetas’ proclamation of Eros (2.7).1
Western Europe began to read Longus mostly in the celebrated French translation of Jacques Amyot (1559), which antedated the editio princeps of the Greek text by Raphael Columbanius, for Filippo Giunta, in 1598. The traditional policy of French kings, at least since Louis XII, was to encourage translations, with the purpose of dignifying the national language, by putting it in contact with ancient languages. Amyot, who was already the author of a French version of Heliodorus (1547), anonymously published Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et de Chloé: his position of abbé and tutor of Henry II’s sons—the future kings of France, Charles IX and Henry III—must have suggested this choice to him. Moralistic scruples are visible in the deletion of some passages considered indecent for their content, such as the details of Daphnis’ sexual initiation by Lycaenion in 3.18.3–4.
Prior to Amyot’s translation is the Italian adaptation of Annibal Caro, which can be dated to 1537, though it remained unpublished until 1786 (Ferrini 1991, 96). In this work, more a rewriting than a translation, it is worth mentioning the passage invented by Caro in place of the great lacuna in 1.1.13–17.4 (Daphnis’s bath and his competition with Dorcon). While Amyot simply omits the text lacking in his manuscript,2 Caro, with manneristic indulgence, invents an exuberant description of the “pelaghetto bellissimo,” where Daphnis bathes (a “beautiful pond,” surrounded by many caves, and full of darting fishes). Nearby is Chloe, whom Daphnis, as a joke, tricks into believing that he wants to join the Nymphs under the waves. In fact, he hides in a cave on the shore, and the ingenuous shepherdess believes that the Nymphs, seduced by his beauty, have taken him prisoner (an echo of the myth of Hyla in Theocr. 13?): “dolente e gelosa non cessava di richiamarlo” (“sorrowful and jealous, she did not cease to call him”). However, here the literary lusus suddenly ends, and Caro declines to prolong his narrative fiction as far as the point of junction with Longus’ text. A similar attitude is shown in the Lycaenion episode: if Amyot’s translation simply unites the passages before and after 3.18.3–4, jumping from “as follows” to “After this lesson,” Caro enlarges this scene, especially the woman’s speech, enhancing, with further details, a passage considered taboo by many translators, even after Amyot.
The first English adaptation, published in London in 1587 by Angel Day, had Amyot as his source. As Amyot did before, Day cuts Lycaenion’s sex lesson from Book 3, but he removes also many of the sensuous passages that still survived in Amyot. When Philetas ends his lesson with “The only remedies are kissing, and embracing, and lying together with naked bodies” (2.7.7), Day translates: “I founde that kisses gave ease to sighes, liking to longing, and bedding eache with other after mariage concluded, the some of all our determined affection” (Jacobs 1890, 61). While Longus describes the nymphs appearing to Daphnis as “tall and beautiful women, half naked and barefooted, with their hair falling free, and like their statues” (2.23.1), Day dissolves vividness into vagueness, writing that “their attire” was “altogether Nimphlike, their countenances freyght with manifest pleasures,” as they “appeared to put forward to his reliefe many occasions of comfort” (71). Gone also are lively episodes such as the animal-imitative dance celebrating the harvest (2.37) or when Chloe puts on Daphnis’ clothes while he bathes (1.24.2). Day clearly aims to eliminate from Longus’ words “the spirit of pagan sensuality that inspires them,” and “to reconcile them with the requirements of Christian morality” (Pruvost 1932–1933, 488). Among many other omissions, there are also the passages in which Daphnis burst into tears (2.17.1; 2.23.1; 3.26.1): Day must have thought that these unrestrained emotional reactions did not suit his hero’s virility and aristocracy. Even when his character feels grief and fear, he somehow retains his conventional virtus (it is probably not a coincidence that the motto on the title page says: Altior fortuna virtus).
Despite such omissions, Day’s adaptation is at least double the length of Amyot’s, since there are several additions, most of which follow the fashion of the time. Day not only enjoys amplifying all the rhetorically inviting passages, such as descriptions of days or seasons, but sprinkles his translation with the customary pastoral verse (singing contests, love complaints, panegyrics, etc.).3 Just at the point where Lycaenion should be giving her love lesson in Book 3, Day inserts a passage of prose and verse, more than 20 pages long, which is separately entitled The Shepheards Holidaie and recounts the shepherds’ yearly feast celebrating their virgin queen, Eliza. The evident anachronism was already announced in the bombastic title: “Daphnis and Chloe, excellently describing the weight of affection, the simplicitie of love, the purport of honest meaning, the resolution of men, and disposition of Fate, finished in a Pastorall, and interlaced with the praises of a most peerlesse Princesse, wonderfull in Maiestie, and rare in perfection, celebrated within the same Pastorall, and therefore termed by the name of ‘The Shepeards Holidaie.’”
These Renaissance “artistic” translations had an essential importance, on more than one level. First of all, they contributed to the creation of an enjoyable language for literary prose: narrative patterns, images, stylistic figures were incorporated from the Greek models into the native literary language. In addition, they invited imitation within their particular genre: an immense number of pastoral romances inspired by or imitating Longus appeared since the middle of the sixteenth century throughout Western Europe. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, this ancient novelist offered poets new possibilities for romance, breaking with the chivalric–heroic models inherited from earlier centuries.
Since the date of publication of Amyot’s translation, Longus’ influence can thus be postulated with relative confidence, while it remains uncertain if occasional analogies found in older works derive from a direct knowledge of the text.4 Longus’ influence on the Arcadia composed by Sannazaro around 1485 and published in 1504, and even on Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano (about 1345), was postulated, for example by Schönberger (1989, 46); but skepticism is probably justified in this regard (Kegel-Brinkgreve 1990, 77–78). Neither Sannazaro’s Arcadia, whose basic pattern, with its prolonged melancholy and unrequited love, derives directly from the Virgilian eclogues, nor other works under the influence of Sannazaro, such as Montemayor’s later Diana, essentially a Heliodoran romance with Virgilian shepherds, really belong in the Longus family. In turn, Montemayor was a model for Cervantes’ Galatea (1585), whose plot partly follows also Sannazaro’s Arcadia. In his last work, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, published after his death in 1617, Cervantes seems to know Longus more directly, but his models are rather Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus (Billault 1992). Political and ideological reasons—due mostly to the omnipotent Inquisition—probably restrained Longus’ success in Spain.5
In France, which was already familiar with the bucolic poetry in the Provençal pastourelles of the Troubadours or in the pastoral drama Le jeu de Robin et de Marion (1283) by Adam de la Halle, Longus-Amyot’s influence is clear in the pastoral collection of Rémy Belleau (a member of the Pléiade), La Bergerie, composed in 1565 and revised in 1572 (Lestrigant 1986). Belleau’s reworking may be considered an instructive example of the sixteenth century approach to Longus. In his revision, the author expands his “Description des vendanges” (Description of the grape harvest) from about 40 lines of the 1565 version to almost 300, with the new title “Vendangeurs: l’amour rustique” (in the Première Journée; in Belleau, Remy. Oeuvres poétiques, edited by Charles Marty-Laveaux. Tome I. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1878, 229–238). While the first version simply describes the activities of wine-making (as Longus does in 2.1.1–3), in the 1572 expansion, this part leads to a tale of love between the shepherd Tenot and Catin, “bergère de haut pris.” There follows a passage strongly reminiscent of Long. 2.3–6: an old man tells Tenot about meeting Love in his garden; the winged boy-archer escapes him like a young partridge. He claims to be of great age despite his childish appearance, and speaks of how he keeps the garden fresh. The scene does not end with Philetas’ remedies for love illness, but with the old man’s disclosure that Tenot’s father, having heard of his hopes to marry, will endow him with many gifts. Every sensual note is eliminated: instead of the pagan philosophy of eros, Belleau constructs a moral tale of virtuous youths, benevolent fathers, and honest old men.
In Italy, the first work certainly related to Longus is Tasso’s Aminta, a pastoral drama written in 1573, a contamination of virtually all previous bucolic motifs. Like Daphnis and Chloe, Aminta and Silvia grow up together:
Oh, alas! I lived, you see,
so close to her for some time that among
two turtle doves no more faithful mates
ever were or will be found.
Our dwellings were conjoined—
but more conjoined our hearts;
our ages close—
but our thoughts closer still.
With her I set the traps for the fish
and nets for the birds
and hunted the stags and quick deer;
and our pleasures and prey were shared. (1.2.74–81; translation from Hayward, as at http://www.english.iup.edu/mhayward/aminta.htm)
Aminta’s pretending to be stung by a bee on the lip (1.2.131) may recall Daphnis’ complaint that Chloe’s kiss hurts more than a bee sting (1.18), but the motif is also found in Achilles Tatius 2.7.6 (see also Theocr. 19, Anacr. 35 W., and Longus, 1.14.2). In Tasso, the image returns in Rime 305); Tasso’s Satyr repeats the bee sting image in 2.1, and his lustful lying in wait for Silvia is perhaps a reminiscence of Longus’ Dorcon in the wolf skin.
A pastoral drama written few years later, influenced both by Tasso and Longus, is Giovan Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1590). The play opens with an old servant’s lesson on human and cosmic love, which recalls Philetas’ speech in Long. 2.7, and ends with a recognition scene between father and lost son, followed by a marriage. In act 4, Silvio meets with the nymph Echo and encounters what he thinks to be a shepherd in a wolf’s skin; but the shepherd turns out to be Silvio’s beloved Dorinda, whom he almost kills with an arrow, a scene that seems a creative re-writing of Dorcon episode in Long. 1.20.
As in the Arcadia by Sannazaro, Guarini’s play also contributed to form the pastoral imagery in later poets: echoes are present, for example, in John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, a “pastoral tragicomedy” (c. 1608), and also in the anonymous Latin play acted at Cambridge in the early 1600s, Pastor Fidus (see Arnold 1990), which contains many motifs familiar in Renaissance romance–drama, influenced by Longus.
Since its “re-emergence” in the Renaissance, Daphnis and Chloe has proved to be the most durable of the Greek novels. Its impact on the development of pastoral romance in Europe has been immeasurable: some literary works from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century are directly influenced by Longus; others follow texts that may themselves lie at more than one remove; and someone even seems to prefer Longus’ pastoral source, Theocritus. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult for us to make a distinction between a direct echo and the development of a well-established literary topos. However, it is not always so important to establish with what degree of awareness an author has taken his inspiration from Longus, since, whatever may be the relationship between the Greek model and the rewriting, the novel has contributed in a decisive way to form the imagery of pastoral romance, with all its typical ingredients.
These narratives present, with varied concentration, certain common traits, already visible in Longus. Heading characters are foundlings or orphans (sometimes only one of them has been abandoned by the parents, as in Sand’s François le Champi and Fadette). Each foundling often retains a mysterious otherness, which distinguishes him/her from the rustic manners of the adoptive parents. There is usually a rival, an older youth like Dorcon. Sometimes also a sage appears, such as the love-wise Philetas with his important speech in Book 2. The narrator tends to describe idyllic peace, by contrast, as recurrently threatened by natural and human dangers (true or alleged wolves, pirates, outsiders’ attacks, kidnappings). Since isolation is almost a necessity for this kind of love story, the setting is usually an island (as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, Stowe’s Pearl of Orr’s Island, Stacpoole’s The Blue Lagoon, and Mishima’s The Sound of Waves), or a remote community or household (as in Sand’s novels). These islands are characterized by some recurrent features: the cave, the spring, the garden, the singular tree, etc. Some analogies are also visible in the narrative technique. Most texts are relatively short, since the narration is quite simple, focusing on the couple alone, and only until the wedding. It partially preserved the tendency, started by Longus, to organize the plot by seasons, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or in Sand’s Fadette. A theme often assumed in these narratives is also “pathetic fallacy,” a shared feeling between nature and humans (as especially in Sand and in Mishima). Besides these common traits, pastoral narrations share motifs that are familiar in every sort of romance: lost or concealed aristocracy, episodes of captivity, prophetic dreams, storms occurring at significant moments, etc.
In Britain, the pastoral genre becomes popular in the Elizabethan age. The Arcadia by Philip Sidney, “the first modern European to compose a full-scale novel in the ancient pattern” (Skretkowicz 1990, 51), combines pastoral elements, depending on the example of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, with a mood mainly derived from the model of Heliodorus (see Wolff 1912 and Carver 1997, who point out a predominant influence of Apuleius on the Old Arcadia and of Heliodorus on the New). Longus’ influence on British authors increases especially since 1587, the year of the publication of Angel Day’s translation. The appearance of Longus in Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589) may mean that Day was his source, but literate Greene would have been himself capable of reading Amyot (Sandy and Harrison 2008, 309). Also, Edmund Spenser was influenced by Longus, especially in his unfinished poem The Faerie Queene (1590–1596).6 Through Day and Greene (or maybe Amyot himself) some of Longus’ influence reached Shakespeare, who, for example in his drama The Tempest, may have had Daphnis and Chloe among his models, and in the Winter’s Tale (III 3) seems to imitate the hunt episode of the Methymnaeans.7 The interest for pastoral drama, favored by G. Jungermann’s Latin translation (1605) and G. Thornley’s English translation (1657), lasted in Britain for several decades, sometimes also with ironical rewritings that appear far from the idealism of Renaissance romance: it is the case of Andrew Marvell’s Daphnis and Chloe (1657), where the couple retains very little of the mutual feeling and sweetness of the Greek model. Still, in the eighteenth century, The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral comedy of the Scottish writer Allan Ramsay (1725), takes some of his inspiration from Longus (Dunlop 1888, I, 57).
In France, after the enthusiasm of the Renaissance, there was a temporary eclipse of Longus’ vogue (Barber 1989, 27–29), which chronologically corresponds, in scholarship, with the severe judgment given by Pierre-Daniel Huet (1670). Starting with the assumption that “the principal End of Romance […] is the Instruction of the Reader; before whom he must present Virtue successful, and Vice in Disgrace” (5), Huet condemned Longus’ style and plot (simplistic because “it begins grossly in the birth of the two shepherds, and ends with their marriage,” 52), and was disturbed by the book’s immorality (“so obscene, that one must be somewhat of a cynic to read it without blushing,” 53). He acknowledged that, in previous times, many learned men had praised Daphnis and Chloe for its “elegance and agreement”; nevertheless, he found in it only “simplicity, which sometimes declines to childishness and impertinence.”
This misjudgment influenced the attitude of many classical scholars, at least until the publication of Jean Baptiste Villoison’s masterful edition of Daphnis and Chloe (1778). In defending the Greek author against his detractors and especially Huet, Villoison finds in this novel an open sincerity and simplicity that must appeal to every class of readers; Longus’ Greek language “flows forth like a silvery stream, shaded by green woods, and is so flourishing, so vivid, so polished that every grace of word and thought is woven into it” (xxxvi). His important scholarly work, with textual notes and commentary extending for over 300 pages, had the merit of conveying a new awareness of Longus’ significance also in classical scholarship, in a period of revival of pastoral fashion in every art.
The eighteenth century marks a significant increase in interest in Longus, in part thanks to the influence of the Swiss Salomon Gessner, who had read Amyot’s translation in his father’s library. From Longus, but even more from Theocritus and Virgil, he drew his idealizing conception of the pastoral world, expressed in the poem Daphnis (1754) and in the Idyllen (1756 and 1772).8 Gessner, in turn, was much read and appreciated in France: his first French translation in 1760 rode a wave of fashionable pastoralism, both in poetry (such as in the Idylles et poëmes champêtres, 1775, by N.G. Léonard), and in prose, as in Annette et Lubin by J.F. Marmontels (1761), a tale of two cousins raised together who, orphaned, fall in love and make love, being unaware of the possible consequences. Like Daphnis and Chloe, they are inseparable, and live only for each other and their flocks: the narration recalls Longus for the atmosphere of their naive falling in love.
The influence of Longus, whether direct or mediated, is found also in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who depicts a sort of ideal Arcadia in his epistolary novel Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloise (1761). The purpose, illustrated in his Préface ou Entretien sur les Romans, of showing “that a man of merit, who wants to retire with his family into the country, and become his own farmer, might enjoy more rational felicity, than in the middle of the amusements of a great city,” closely recalls Longus’ conclusion: after marriage, Daphnis chooses to live in the country with his family, becoming his own farmer.9 Rousseau, together with Longus, became a model for Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787): the novel tells the simple and genuine life of two youths—in the innocence of nature, far from corrupt civilization—on the tropical island of Mauritius (the sunny landscape and the ingenuous passions of the main characters earned the work the title of “Le Daphnis et Chloé français”: see Billault 1985).
Among Gessner’s French admirers there was also Jean-Pierre Florian, who introduced into Gessner’s idealized Arcadia a deep attachment to actual places, the idyllic landscapes of his homeland, in the south of France: “I will celebrate my country”—he announces at the beginning of Estelle (1787)—“I will paint those pretty lands where the green olive, the red mulberry, the golden clusters grow together beneath an eternally blue heaven.” Some landscape descriptions in this pastoral romance, whose protagonists are two shepherds—Nemorin, orphaned in childhood, and Estelle, his beloved companion since that time—recall Longus’ emphasis on the countryside; but the plot, with several incidents and reversals, has more in common with the Heliodorus tradition than with the terse simplicity of Daphnis and Chloe. In fact, his narration owes much also to the adventure–romance style of Montemayor or Cervantes’s Galatea, which Florian had recently translated.
Using the pattern of idyllic romances, especially as set by Longus and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, George Sand renewed the genre with an original mediation between a too stylized and Arcadian ideal of nature and the actual rural life of her own region. Her three chief novels—the romans champêtres—were written close together in time, and all first appeared in serialization: La Mare au Diable (The Devil’s Pool ) in 1846, François le Champi (François the Waif) in 1947–1948, La Petit Fadette (Little Fadette) in 1848. This is the time of Corot’s paintings inspired by Longus. Sand never concealed her interest for Daphnis and Chloe. In the introduction to François le Champi, she writes that “from the shepherds of Longus down to those of Trianon, pastoral life has been a perfumed Eden, where souls tormented and abandoned by tumult of the world have sought a refuge.” In La Petit Fadette, the marriage of the two lovers is favored by the heroine’s unexpected inheritance of 4,000 francs (Chapter 33), which recalls the miraculous finding of the bag with 3,000 drachmas by Daphnis (Long. 3.28). Sand’s fondness for Longus is confirmed by the fact that, in 1861 and 1862, she staged, in the small theater of her house at Nohan, a three-act comedy entitled Daphnis et Chloé (Vieillefond 1987, xci–xcii).
The reading of Amyot’s translation and a journey in the native Cévennes gave inspiration to Ferdinand Fabre to write the idyllic country novel Le Chevrier (1866), appreciated by C.A. de Saint-Beuve and Frédéric Mistral. Mistral himself, in 1859, composed the narrative poem Mirèio, in 12 cantos, which, however far (and not only in the tragic conclusion) from Longus’ terse charm, presents some thematic analogies with the Greek model. Like Florian and Sand, Mistral dedicated himself to the geography and history of his native region, as well as to its language (the poem is written in the Occitan language of southeastern France). Reminiscences of Theocritus and Longus are present also in the Chansons de Bilitis traduites du grec pour la première fois by Pierre Louÿs (1894), a writer most renowned for lesbian and classical themes. With a common fictional device, these songs, separated into three cycles (Bucolics in Pamphylia, Elegies at Mytilene, Epigrams in the Isle of Cyprus), are attributed to the discovery of a German archaeologist.
Also with regard to German literature, the success of Gessner’s work exerted its influence on most of the following Arcadian literature. The enthusiastic judgment given by Goethe is renowned, who read Longus’ novel first in Amyot’s French translation and then in Passow’s German one, appreciating, among other qualities, its skillful composition and use of “delay,” and recommending the yearly reading.10 In Goethe’s production, echoes of Longus can be seen in the idyll Herman und Dorothea (1796–1798), in the “arkadisches Lied” of Faust second part (vv. 9526 sgg.), and in some lyrics composed as commentary on Wilhelm Tischbein’s Idyllen. Even in the different Romantic taste, Gessner’ idylls did not cease to influence the poetic production of the nineteenth century: traces of Longus, through the intermediary of Gessner, are still recognizable, at the end of the century, in Hastenbeck (1899) by Wilhelm Raabe, with a German setting for Daphnis and Chloe’s love story.
The first writer who has shown a full understanding of the genre’s social implications is perhaps George Sand. Her rustic novels aim at providing solace and tranquility after the political turmoil of 1848. As if to take precautions against possible charges of escape from reality, in the preface to La Petit Fadette she describes idyllic writing as a political act in itself:
In times when evil comes from men’s misunderstanding and hating each other, the artist’s mission is to celebrate sweetness, mutual confidence, and friendship, and thereby to remind hardened or discouraged humanity that purity of morals, tender sentiments, and pristine justice still exist, or at least can exist, in this world. Direct allusion to present ills, appeals to excited passions—these do not lead to salvation; a sweet song, an air on the rustic pipe, a tale with which to lull little children to sleep without fear and suffering, is better than the spectacle of real evils deepened and darkened still more by the colours of fiction.
About 300 years before Sand, during the sixteenth-century French religious wars, Remy Belleau also found uses for Daphnis and Chloe: as Barber (1989, 11) has argued, “the Greek story not only provided him with specific incidents, but also […] with the nostalgia for a quiet, peaceful and retired life.”
Sand’s use of pastoral romance as a catharsis for violence is also evident in Yukio Mishima’s 1954 The Sound of Waves (Japanese title: Shiosai), a post-war Japanese novel, which Marguerite Yourcenar (1986, 40) praised as “infinitely purer” than the Greek model. Its publication less than a decade after Hiroshima, at a time of world history when Longus’ romance would seem to have run its course, reminds us that the idyllic stories of George Sand were composed to counter war’s effect upon contemporary society. Such a connection between idyllicism and tumultuous historical reality seems to be confirmed by the modern publishing history of Longus’ novel, with editions appearing in Weimar in 1917 and 1918, in the Netherlands in 1943, and in Berlin and Heidelberg in 1945, followed soon by editions in Hamburg and Munich. Readers in post-war Japan were also discovering Daphnis and Chloe: Ferrini (1991, 253–254) lists translations in 1947, 1948, 1949 (two), 1951, and later. Mishima’s attempt to recreate Longus’ Greek island in his own country was probably encouraged by this widespread pastoral fashion. However, some hints of recent history remain here and there, such as the description of the death of Shinji’s father in an air attack on his fishing boat: as in Longus, idyllic peace is continuously threatened by the external world, which coincides here with the real world.
Like Florian, Mistral, and Sand, Mishima sets the novel in his own country: the rural Lesbos, land of shepherds, becomes a Japanese island of fishermen (fishermen’s characters were already in the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and in Sannazaro’s “piscatory” eclogues). The Greek model provides Mishima with many themes and narrative kernels. Like Daphnis and Chloe, Shinji and Hatsue discover a new erotic desire when they see each other naked. Like in Longus, there is a rival, an ambitious boy named Yasuo. The seasonal cycle that helps to shape Longus’ narration returns here in a shorter form, from the beginning of their love in the early spring to the couple’s engagement in late August. Most of all, in common with the Greek model, there is a feeling of profound correspondence with nature: perhaps Mishima succeeds in reviving the ancient text so convincingly just because, without renouncing a modern sense of inner life, it retains most of the lively pantheism of Longus. This consonance with nature frequently speaks in Mishima’s images of the sea: Shinji hears “the sound of waves striking the shore,” and it is as though “the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea’s great tides” (Mishima 1954).
As in every rewriting, some passages are transformed according to the author’s poetics. For example, Mishima converts the pastoral episode of Dorcon in the wolf skin (which could be fully appreciated only by a learned reader, familiar with Homer; on this passage as a conscious rewriting in bucolic style of Dolon episode in Il. 10, see Pattoni 2005, 33–39) in a more realistic situation, while retaining the same delicate humor of the original: Yasuo lies in wait at night to catch Hatsue drawing water, and the girl is rescued when an angry hornet, not a pack of dogs, attacks Yasuo. Also, the ending of Daphnis and Chloe—so closely linked to the literary conventions of his age—is profoundly changed. In Longus, the couple’s wedding was achieved through external intervention, with the help of gods (Eros, Pan, the Nymphs) and tyche: first the finding of the bag full of gold, and then, more important, the recognition scene, a typical device of New Comedy. In Mishima, the male character redeems himself from the passivity that in Longus he shared with the female one, and overcomes the social obstacles to his marriage through a heroic deed: during a storm, he proves himself by saving his future father-in-law’s ship. While Longus shaped his conclusion on the comic genre, Mishima chooses an ending in a fairy-tale style: his hero conquers the hand of his beloved, the daughter of the richest man in the village, through a proof of incredible force and courage.
Mishima’s novel, well received not only by critics but also by a large, international audience, confirms that readers are still attracted by the “pleasantness of the subject,” a quality that already Raphael Columbanius (1598), editor of the first printed text, recognized in Longus. The interest shown, in more recent times, by cinema also gives further evidence of the lucky formula of this evergreen classic (for references on Longus’ reception in cinema and also in visual arts, see the listings under Further Readings), which appeals to every class of reader, as Villoison had rightly foreseen.
1 A possible reminiscence before Byzantine novels has been seen by McCail 1988 in an anacreontic poem by the ninth-century poet Constantine of Rhodes, which describes an encounter with Eros quite similar to that of Philetas; the identification, however, is not sure, since Constantine might have been imitating some other lost models.
2 The only manuscript transmitting the complete text at this point is the thirteenth-century Florentinus Laurentianus conv(enti) soppr(essi) 627 (termed F by Reeve), which had been known to Politian in the late fifteenth century, but it remained disregarded at the Badia in Florence until Paul-Louis Courier used it for his edition published in Rome in 1810. Therefore, having found the complete text in F, Courier was the first editor and also translator of the lacuna.
3 The same attitude is shown in Lorenzo Gambara’s Expositi, an adaptation in Latin hexameters, published in Antwerp in 1569 and reprinted several times, until the edition of Longus’ pastoral novel by B.G.L. Boden (Lipsiae, 1777). Gambara leaves out not only the erotic scenes, but also the mythological narratives (Pitys, Syrinx, Echo), and other episodes such as the Methymnaeans’ invasion and the sacrifice for Chloe (here called Leuke). Many are the new scenes introduced (e.g. didactic speeches and an epithalamium in elegiac distiches for the protagonists’ wedding).
4 The situation is different for the humanists, who knew Greek, such as Henricus Stephanus: visiting Italy between 1547 and 1555, he examined manuscripts of Greek novels, among them F, and he read enough of Longus to publish in 1555 renderings in Latin pastoral of two episodes from Book 1, both preserved only in F; see Reeve (2008, 388).
5 Traces of Longus have been seen in the novel Arcadia by Lope de Vega (1598), even if filtered by intermediate sources. In the nineteenth century, Juan de Valera (1879), who translated Longus’ work with refined irony and grace, gave a considerable contribution to the knowledge of this novelist in Spain. On Longus’ influence on Spanish literature of the last two centuries, see Hardin 2000, 135–160, 216–22.
6 According to Doyle 1974, Faunus’ assault on the nymph Molanna in the sixth Canto of the added Mutabilitie also derives some of its details from Dorcon’s attack on Chloe.
7 The possibility that Shakespeare made direct use of Daphnis and Chloe as a source for The Tempest has been argued by Gesner 1970, who sees similarities, besides the setting on a natural island full of music, in the celebration of youth and innocence, in aspects of the scenario such as a storm and incursion by outsiders, and in some correspondences between characters (Philetas and Prospero, Eros and Ariel, Daphnis and Ferdinand, Chloe and Miranda, Dorcon and Caliban). On Winter’s Tale and As You Like It, see also Kegel-Brinkgreve 1990, 494–516.
8 Gessner himself acknowledged that Longus—along with Virgil and, chiefly, Theocritus—had formed the basis of all his pastorals (see letter of the 29 November 1754 in Gessner, Salomon. Sämtliche Schriften. I–III, Zurich, 1972: Orell Fussli, III, 143).
9 The similarities with Longus seem to involve also specific parts of the work, though it is not always easy to distinguish between direct imitation and topical situation: the episode of Chloe’s first kiss (1.17–18) shows analogies with Julie’s first kiss (I 16); Dionysophanes’ garden (4.2–4) reminds one of M. and Mme de Wolmar’s (4.11); reminiscence of the grape harvest scene in Long. 2.1–2 and 36 may be recognized in the idyllic scene of the grape harvest at Clarens (5.7).
10 In Gespräche mit Eckermann, 9, 14, 20, 21; März (1831). About Goethe’s judgment, see Schönberger 1984, 36–39 and Hägg 1983, 212–213.
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Doody, M.A. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Doyle, C.C. 1974. “Daphnis and Chloe and the Faunus episode in Spenser’s mutability.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 74: 163–168.
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Fusillo, M. 2008. “Modernity and post-modernity.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 321–339.
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A comprehensive account of the textual transmission of Daphnis and Chloe can be found in Reeve’s preface to the Teubner text (and see also Morgan 1997, 2224–2229). Basic information about Longus’ editions and translations in all languages is provided by Ferrini 1991, with detailed bibliographical listings. A more discursive account of the publication history, from Amyot’s translation to the reawakening interest in late nineteenth century, is given by Barber 1989 (for further details on Amyot’s influence in European literature, see also Stone 1979, Lestrigant 1986, and Plazenet 2002). Angel Day’s adaptation was compared with its source, Amyot’s version, by Wolff (1912, 465–469). On the Italian translations by Annibal Caro and Gasparo Gozzi, see Berger 1988. Bianchi 2006 prints a partial Latin translation by Girolamo Amati (1768–1834) contained in Vat. Lat. 9780.
For a list of literary works more or less directly influenced by Longus, a useful starting point is the “Nachleben” appendix in Schönberger 1989, 45–52; other overviews are given by García Gual 1972, 263–275; Vieillefond 1987, lxxx–xcviii; McCail 2002, xxvii–xxix, and Pattoni 2005, 180–189. For the studies published between 1950 and 1995, see the excellent Bibliographical Survey in Morgan 1997, 2273–2276. Among the studies published after 1995 and not mentioned in Morgan’s survey, see Doody 1996, which has focused long-needed attention on the Greek romance backgrounds of the novel, in a comparative approach. A work of broader scope that explores the literary tradition of idyllic romance from the Renaissance to the twentieth century is Hardin 2000. Montague 1994 offers a lively analysis of the parallels between Daphnis and Chloe and those popular novels known generally as “Harlequins” (as, for example, Interlude in Arcady, by Margery Hilton, 1969).
In ICAN IV (Lisbon, 21–26 July 2008, “Crossroad on the Ancient Novel: Spaces, Frontiers, Intersections”), one of the parallel sessions was “The Reception of the Ancient Novel in Literature and Art”; see the abstracts of Carlos García Gual (“The Ancient Novel and the Novel of the Spanish Golden Age”), Roman Reisinger (“Le modèle de D&C et sa réception dans la littérature médiévale française”), Akihiko Watanabe (“The Ancient Novel in modern Japan”), and Simone Beta (“‘Daphnis and Chloe’ on the stage at the end of the 19th century”).
Regarding Longus’ reception in visual arts: one of the earliest notable allusions has been seen in a painting by Giovanni Battista Bertucci, active from 1498 to 1516 (the picture was formerly attributed to Francesco Bianchi Ferrari: Ingamells [1985, 215–217]); a description with commentary is given by Hardin 2000, 28–29. Ioannides 1991 has argued that the famous painting by Titian traditionally called The Three Ages of Man (1516) was inspired by the story of Daphnis and Chloe. Since both these pictures antedate the publication of the first translation and the first Greek text (see McCail 2002, xxix), knowing more about the sources of the two painters (among whom, more or less directly, Politian) would aid us in tracing the prepublication history of Longus in the Renaissance.
One of the artists who most loved this theme was Chagall. Cueva 2000–2001 has rightly argued about the important influence of Mir Istkusstva (an artistic movement with the aim to accelerate the evolution of Russian art) on the genesis of Chagall’s paintings and stage designs for the ballet Daphnis and Chloe by Ravel. Further references are listed in Morgan 1997, 2275; among these, see in particular Hägg 1983, which prints a series of 14 book illustrations, ranging from Crispin de Passe (1626) to Aristide Maillot (1937); Van de Wijer 1983, who examines five illustrations, from de Pass to Paul Avril (1898), to document changing approaches; and Moulin 1983, who looks more in detail at the work of François Gérard.
Over music, too, the story has exercised its power. For a list of musical works influenced by Longus, see Schönberger 1989, 52. Of these, the most famous treatment is perhaps Ravel’s in his “symphonic choréographique” Daphnis and Chloe (1912), on which see Bossuyt 1983 and Fusillo 2008, 325–327. Simone Beta, in his abstract in ICAN IV, analyzes some operette at the end of the nineteenth century, composed by Jacques Offenbach (1860), Fernand Le Bon, a pupil of Massenet (1885), Henri Busser (1897), Henri Maréchal (1899), and the amusing parody by Angelo Casirola (1894).
Longus’ emphasis on landscape contributes to explaining his success in film adaptations. Landscapes play a central role in one of the earliest Greek films, Daphnis and Chloe, by Orestis Laskatos, whose setting is on the island of Mytilene, as in the original (on this silent movie, see Delveroudi 2000). An island fishing village, visited by some shepherds in search of water, is the setting of the freely adapted Young Aphrodites (Mikres Aphrodites, 1963), by the Cretan director Nikos Kondouros (stills from these two movies are printed in Kussl 1992). A third, more recent and conventional movie, is Dafnis i Khloya by the Russian Yuri Kuzmenkov, based on a novel by I.M. Nagibin, A Daphnis and Chloe in the Era of the Cult of Personality, Voluntarism and Stagnation (1992). For a useful commentary on these three films, see Fusillo 2008, 327–328. Stacpoole’s popular novel, The Blue Lagoon (1908), shares with Longus (and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre) the theme of the ingenuous discovery of love on an island full of natural beauty: Hardin 2000, 182, lists numerous film adaptations of this story, from the 1923 silent film to the more famous 1980 film, starring Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins.