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Daphnis & Chloe
Introduction
Daphnis and Chloe is one of the earliest, and certainly the best known, of the Greek novels. It is traditionally ascribed to Longus, but whether he wrote it or indeed even existed is not known. (The Latin form of his name suggests that the ascription is a muddle of some kind.) It was probably written around C.E. 200, although the earliest surviving manuscript, which was discovered by Paul-Louis Courier in the Laurenziana Library in Florence in 1809, dates from the thirteenth century. Longus was not one of the great classical authors to whom European humanist scholars turned their attention during the Renaissance, and it was not until 1598 that the Greek text was published— more than a century after the texts of Homer and Aristotle, just to mention two, had been printed. Daphnis and Chloe had already, however, been published in both French (1559) and English (1587); its popularity thus goes back almost 500 years now, and there can scarcely have been a time during those five centuries when the book was not available.
The story of the novel is a simple one. Both Daphnis and Chloe were exposed as infants by well-born parents who found themselves unable to take care of them, and each was separately rescued and brought up by shepherds, Daphnis by Lamon and Chloe by Dryas. They grow up together, and gradually fall in (very innocent) love. Adventures befall both, including a visit by pirates, and towards the end of the story the two sets of parents are re-found, and Daphnis and Chloe are able to marry. The setting is a purely pastoral one, and the landscape as well as the seasons are a vital component of the charm the novel has never lost. The final scene is in the bridal chamber, when the two lovers enjoy the fruits of married love.
Longus's prose romance (as it really is, rather than a novel in the now accepted sense of the term) has long attracted illustrators, from the eighteenth-century French artists who emphasized its nascent (and covert) sexuality, to Pierre Bonnard and Marc Chagall in the twentieth century, who were attracted—Chagall in particular—to the pastoral innocence of the story as much as to its possibilities as a naughty drama. Daphnis and Chloe was also a favorite of the printing revival artists and the illustrators associated with the 1890s, such as Charles Ricketts. The Ashendene Press edition of 1933 was the last of a series of editions in this vein, and was in fact the last book of the press. Giles Barber, whose 1988 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library were devoted to the printing history of the book, called it "an unknown bestseller," and demonstrated that for centuries it has been almost never out of print. Even as late as 1988, for Susan Allix's beautiful edition (see Case Five) it was not only re-illustrated in a fine, quasi-abstract style, but even re-translated by numismatic scholar A.M. Burnett.
It is clear that a number of the editions of Longus owned by the Clark Library were acquired during the librarianship of Lawrence Clark Powell who was, himself, a private collector of the novel. The Clark does not own the first edition in either French (only six copies known) or English (only one), but it does own copies of a large number of other editions, and is thus able to demonstrate vividly the way in which this book has been printed and pictured from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Bruce Whiteman, Head Librarian
