Introduction
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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. Read More
Exhibition by Bruce Whiteman
Website by Chris Bulock