Daphnis and Chloe

A masterpiece among early Greek romances

A tender novel describing eager and inept young love, Daphnis and Chloe tells the story of a baby boy and girl who are discovered separately, two years apart, alone and exposed on a Greek mountainside. Taken in by a goatherd and a shepherd respectively, and raised near the town of Mytilene, they grow to maturity unaware of one another’s existence - until the mischievous god of love, Eros, creates in them a sudden overpowering desire for one another. A masterpiece among early Greek romances, attracting both high praise and moral disapproval, this work has proved an enduringly fertile source of inspiration for musicians, writers and artists from Henry Fielding to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Maurice Ravel. Longus transforms familiar themes from the romance genre - including pirates, dreams, and the supernatural - into a virtuoso love story that is rich in insight, humorous and ironical in its treatment of human sexual experience.

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Nothing is known about Longus. His name may indicate that he was a native of Italy who wrote in Greek.

Paul Turner was born in 1917, and educated at Winchester and King’s College, Cambridge. He served in the RNVR (air branch) during the war, and then taught English literature at London, Cambridge, and Ankara universities, before joining the Oxford English Faculty in 1964. He is now an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has published a volume on the Victorians in the Oxford History of English Literature, and his translations from Greek, Latin, and German include Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Lucian’s Satirical Sketches, and Ovid’s Art of Love. His critical biography of Thomas Hardy came out in 1998, and his edition of Robert Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology in 2001. In 2002 he was made an MBE.