"Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé".

Geneve, 1777.
13 x 7 cm., 172 pages.
Text in French.

Bound in period full leather,gilt on spine, marbled endpapers.

Very good condition.

Daphnis and Chloe (Greek: Δάφνις καὶ Χλόη, Daphnis kai Chloē) is an ancient Greek novel written in the Roman Empire, the only known work of the second-century AD Greek novelist and romance writer Longus.

Longus's romance tells the story of two teenagers, Daphnis and Chloe, who love each other but do not know how to make love. Around their predicament Longus weaves a fantasy which entertains and instructs, but never errs in taste. The hard toil and precariousness of peasant life are here, but
so are its compensations--revelry, music, dance, and storytelling. Above the action brood divinities--Eros, Dionysus, Pan, the Nymphs--who collaborate to guide the adolescents into the mystery of Love, at once a sensual and a religious initiation. Daphnis and Chloe is the best known, and the best,
of the early Greek romances, precursors to the modern novel. Admired by Goethe, it has been reinterpreted in music and art by Ravel and Chagall.