Rewriting Longus: A Naturalized Daphnis and Chloe in Renaissance Spain

Abstract

"Whereas the Greek works of Theocritus, Longus and of minor Greek pastoral authors were ironic, distanced, and amusing, the works of Virgil and his many centuries of Western European followers were serious, subjective, and melancholy. Nowhere is that difference more obvious than in the Renaissance translations/adaptations of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. A case in point is that work’s translation/adaptation by the minor sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Damasio de Frías, who transformed a witty and ironic Hellenistic work into a fully Virgilian Renaissance pastoral."