Too disturbed to make love with her, Daphnis decides that Chloe should remain a virgin. His hackles are raised when other suitors try to court her. His desire to marry her is aided by the discovery that he is not a poor man’s son at all. He was exposed at birth by an aristocratic father whose family was already large enough. Chloe similarly turns out to be the daughter of a wealthy family. A rich life in the city does not appeal to the young couple, who return to a jolly wedding in the countryside. They are united, at last, by Love. Their future children will be shepherds.

Then when it was night, and Venus rising up the horizon, they all lead the Bride and Bridegroom to their Chamber, some playing upon Whistles and Hoboyes, some upon the oblique Pipes, some holding great Torches.

And when they came near to the door, they chang’d their tone, and gave a grating harsh sound, nothing like the Hymenaeus, but as if the Virgin Earth had bin torn with many Tridents.

But Daphnis and Chloe lying naked together, began to clip, and kisse, and twine, and strive with one another, sleeping no more than birds of the night; and Daphnis now did the Trick that his Mistris Lycaenium had taught him in the thicket. And Chloe then first knew, that those things that were done in the Wood, were only the sweetest Sports of Shepherds.

A SHAM SACRIFICE

Leucippe and Clitophon

Achilles Tatius

Translated by Anthony Hodges, 1638

Achilles Tatius was a Greek novelist of the second century AD from Alexandria in Egypt. His tale of Leucippe and Clitophon, of unknown date, shares many similarities with Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. The young lovers have eloped only to run into trouble. When they are shipwrecked they attempt to make their way to Alexandria. Some Egyptian bandits – or ‘theeves’, in Anthony Hodges’s dramatic seventeenth-century translation – set upon them and kidnap Leucippe with the intention of offering her as a human sacrifice. Cue the highly theatrical series of events in this extract from the novel.