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Inspired by a journey through Greece, Marc Chagall, one of the twentieth-centurys most popular painters, created a wonderful series of lithographs that brought to life this ancient Greek love story. The story of Daphnis and Chloe, a pastoral romance attributed to the Greek poet Longus, follows the adventures of two foundling children raised by adoptive parents, who are humble shepherds in the idyllic setting of the Isle of Lesbos. As Daphnis and Chloe grow to be young adults tending their sheep and goats on the sun-drenched Grecian hillsides, they discover that their friendship is turning to love but in their innocence they do not know how to proceed. Together they experience many trials and tribulations before finally realising their true fate. Daphnis and Chloe has served through the ages as an inspiration for nearly every love story that has followed including Romeo and Juliet.

A tender novel describing eager and inept young love, Daphnis and Chloe tells the story of a baby boy and girl who are discovered separately, two years apart, alone and exposed on a Greek mountainside. Taken in by a goatherd and a shepherd respectively, and raised near the town of Mytilene, they grow to maturity unaware of one another's existence until the mischievous god of love, Eros, creates in them a sudden overpowering desire for one another. A masterpiece among early Greek romances, attracting both high praise and moral disapproval, this work has proved an enduringly fertile source of inspiration for musicians, writers and artists from Henry Fielding to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Maurice Ravel. Longus transforms familiar themes from the romance genre including pirates, dreams, and the supernatural into a virtuoso love story that is rich in insight, humorous and ironical in its treatment of human sexual experience.