That last was Philetas, the wise old shepherd who told Daphnis and Chloe the story of the gay little Eros whom he had found playing in his garden flying like a nightingale from bough to bough of the myrtles, a lovely story with a point for Philetas’ ars amatoria.[284] The other inset stories are mostly short myths. So Daphnis tells Chloe how the mourning dove was once a maid, very proud of her singing and by her song alone she kept the cows she tended near her in the wood. But a shepherd lad rivalled her music and piped off eight of her finest cows to his own herd. And the girl in despair prayed to become a bird. The gods consented and left her that sweet voice so still she calls the cattle home.[285]
At the feast of Dionysus Lamo tells a myth which a Sicilian goatherd had sung to him, a tiny tale of how the girl Syrinx fleeing Pan’s embraces was changed into a reed and then made by Pan into his pipe, with reeds of unequal lengths to symbolize their ill-matched love.[286] All these stories are very short and simple, bits of folk-lore such as peasants might relate at their feasts or in the open.
Much of the whole narrative is colored by a humor that is as playful and tender as the spirit of Philetas’ merry child Eros. In the vintage scene both Daphnis and Chloe are beset with childish jealousy at the attentions that each other receives.[287] The author’s humor plays around them from the time when they first herded their flocks together to the day of their rural wedding. And the plot is set with humor, which as Wolff observes, turns on “the incongruity between the children’s innocence and the piquancy of their experiments.”[288]
It is not strange that Longus’ Pastorals with all their charm of plot, setting and style were the forerunners of much later literature. Todd has a paragraph which is a sign-post to the line of his successors.[289]
“Longus invented the pastoral romance, and his influence is found throughout the pastorals of the modern European literatures: already, perhaps, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the Arcadia of the ‘Neapolitan Virgil’ Jacopo Sannazaro; in the Aminta of Tasso, in the Astrée of D’Urfé, in the Gentle Shepherd of Ramsay, in the Paul et Virginie of Saint-Pierre, and in other writings almost countless.”
S. L. Wolff’s elaborate study of The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction analyzes in detail Longus’ influence on Robert Greene in Manaphon and Pandost and Shakespeare’s use of Longus in the pastoral setting, the hunt scene, the exposure motif in The Winter’s Tale. There is rich material still left in the study of the Greek Romances for the young scholar working in Comparative Literature. By them, by all students of literature Daphnis and Chloe deserves to be read and reread. For Longus, just as Theocritus did in the Idyl, immortalized in the realm of fiction the loves and woes of shepherds.
It is strange that a pastoral romance of such honest and simple charm should have played a dramatic part in a melodrama of the early nineteenth century. Yet it did, for it almost caused an international literary warfare; it almost had a French officer shot for desertion; and it created serious political complications for him with the Bonaparte family.
Paul Louis Courier (1773-1825) led a bizarre life as a vine-grower, an officer in the artillery, a liberal pamphleteer, a member of the Legion of Honor, a prisoner in Sainte-Pélagie, a traveller, a poet, a Hellenist. Throughout his checkered career, he anticipated Byron in his romantic passion for the antiquities, the ruins, the beauty of Greece. In 1811 he wrote from Rome: “The fact is that I wish before I die to see the lantern of Demosthenes and drink the water of the Ilissus.”
It was this passion combined with his disgust at the butcheries of Wagram that made him forget that he was a soldier so that in 1809, though he was the head of a squadron of artillery, he slipped out of military life and in Italy devoted all his time to those literary studies to which before he had given his leisure.
Reared in the country (at Méré in Touraine), he had early become fascinated with the pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe and now he was determined to work on a Thirteenth Century Greek manuscript of it which was in the Laurentian Library. After some difficulty he obtained permission from the librarian, Francesco Furia, and his work started happily. It was to meet with the greatest success and the greatest disaster. Courier, amateur that he was, discovered that the Laurentian manuscript contained the text of the great lacuna in Book I (cc. 12-17). These chapters were lacking in all other manuscripts. Furia who had worked for years on the manuscript, which was in parts nearly illegible, had never noticed these hitherto unknown chapters. They contain the episode of Daphnis tumbling into the trap-ditch, Chloe’s falling in love with him thereafter, and the contest of Daphnis and Dorco for Chloe’s kiss.