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.”