I always think of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as the ‘first novel’, although I know Robinson Crusoe came before. A quick and guilty Wikipedia search informs me that there are several other forerunners. Woe is me and my literary know-how. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe predates lots of the contenders (take that, Le Morte d’Arthur!). Its estimated date of writing is somewhere between 200 and 300AD. And, for the trivia vultures, Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton goes further back even than that, to before 150 AD.
But onto the book itself. I had no idea what it was when I picked it up at a secondhand book shop’s 50% off everything sale. I love me a Penguin Classic, especially one with a picture of a goat suckling a baby on the front cover. The picture depicts Daphnis as he was first seen by his foster parents, abandoned, accompanied by tokens of wealth. Chloe’s babyhood is similar to that of Daphnis; she is found by another peasant couple being fed in a cave by a ewe. Lying beside her are a golden girdle, golden sandals and golden anklets.
Artefacts of ancient Greek and Roman literature are often exemplars of the poetic conventions distilled by theorists such as Aristotle and it’s therefore no surprise that Longus’ plot is almost diagrammatical, with its outstanding economy and transparency. Elements such as character types (for example, the opportunistic, leering Gnathon and Daphnis’ grasping parents), overt sexism and classism, and an utterly servile cause and effect dynamic evoke a time of writing when a novel was a fairly different creature to what it is or can be now–although I realise that the above descriptors could fairly be applied to much modern fiction.
It’s a fun example of escapist fiction. An equivalent modern experience to Daphnis and Chloe would probably be a fairytale or a pantomime, considering the pace and rhythm of the events, the dramatic descriptions and oblique sexual references. Lovely pastoral romances like this spoiled little girls like me, doomed forever to anticipate purer and more exciting romantic experiences than any we would ever know. But they also gave us an enduring love for the prettinesses of what the translator Paul Turner calls a golden world.
