Longus


"The Pastorals,

or the

Loves of Daphnis and Chloe"


 illustrations by

Marc Chagall
 

Longus

flourished 3rd century AD


Greek writer, author of Daphnis and Chloe, the first pastoral prose romance (see pastoral literature) and one of the most popular of the Greek erotic romances.

The story concerns Daphnis and Chloe, two foundlings brought up by shepherds in Lesbos, who gradually fall in love and finally marry. The author is less concerned with the complications of plot, however, than with describing the way that love developed between his hero and heroine, from their first naïve and confused feelings of childhood to full sexual maturity. Longus' penetrating psychological analysis contrasts strongly with the inept characterization of other Greek romances. His stylized descriptions of gardens and landscapes and the alternating of the seasons show a notable feeling for nature. The general tone of his romance is dictated by the quality prescribed by ancient critics for the bucolic genre—glykytes, a “sweetening” of the pastoral life.

Marc Chagall

(b Vitebsk [now Viciebsk], Belarus’, 7 July 1887; d Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, 28 March 1985).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, ceramicist and writer of Belarussian birth. A prolific artist, Chagall excelled in the European tradition of subject painting and distinguished himself as an expressive colourist. His work is noted for its consistent use of folkloric imagery and its sweetness of colour, and it is characterized by a style that, although developed in the years before World War I, underwent little progression throughout his long career. Though he preferred to be known as a Belarussian artist, following his exile from the Soviet Union in 1923 he was recognized as a major figure of the Ecole de Paris, especially in the later 1920s and the 1930s. In his last years he was regarded as a leading artist in stained glass.