Longus, Daphnis and Chloe: An Intermediate Ancient Greek Reader

This book provides vocabulary and commentary to Longus’ ancient romance novel Daphnis and Chloe (c. 150-250 CE), one of the last great works of Ancient Greek pagan literature. Longus’ text tells the ostensibly simple story of how an innocent young boy (the goatherder Daphnis) and girl (the shepherdess Chloe) on the Aegean island of Lesbos gradually discover love, sex, and their true selves in a semi-idealized pastoral environment. In actuality, however, this narrative surface conceals an intricately crafted and highly polished work that, as it delights the eyes and ears with its rhythmical, symmetrical, and variegated verbal patternings, explores questions concerning gender and the relations between the sexes, investigates the relationship between instinct and culture, and offers a sophisticated commentary on the interrelationship of τέχνη (“art”) and φύσις (“nature”), μῦθος (“fiction/imagination”) and λόγος (“factual account/truth”).The vocabulary lists in this edition employ the up-to-date English definitions found in Franco Montanari’s The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (2015), and are therefore superior to those found in the one other English language student commentary on Daphnis and Chloe aimed at intermediate-level readers, Byrne and Cueva’s Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe: An Annotated Edition (Mundelein [IL], 2005), which rely on the mid-nineteenth-century English of LSJ9 (Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Stuart Jones, J., and Mackenzie, R. (eds.). A Greek-English Lexicon [9th edition]. Oxford, 1968). In addition, the notes in this edition, which are more numerous and detailed than those in Byrne and Cueva’s text, explicate syntactical and grammatical aspects that may be challenging for intermediate students, point out many (not all!) of the various literary/rhetorical figures and tropes that are extensively employed, and supply information on historical and cultural issues raised by the novel. Lastly, a glossary is included of words that occur more than three times. Read more