Longus'Daphnis and Chloe

Abstract

This chapter contains a brief history of Longus' reception in literature from the re-discovery of the text in the Renaissance to modern times. Western Europe began to read Longus mostly in the “artistic” translations of Jacques-Amyot, Lorenzo Gambara, Angel Day, Annibal Caro, who did not usually confine themselves to a literal version of the Greek original but inserted into the text much of their own work, inviting imitation within the genre: an immense number of pastoral romances inspired by or imitating Longus appeared since the middle of the sixteenth century throughout western Europe. After a temporary eclipse, which chronologically corresponds, in scholarship, with the severe judgment given by Huet (1670), Longus' vogue regained favor in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a period of revival of pastoral fashion in every art. Meanwhile, Villoison's masterful edition (1778) had the merit of conveying a new awareness of this novelist's significance also in classical scholarship. Among the authors mostly influenced by Longus, there are Rémy Belleau, Tasso, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Goethe, George Sand, and Mishima.

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