Longus’s influential novel, Daphnis and Chloe, is barely present in Hungarian literary education. This paper sets out to provide a methodological example for the understanding of the novel by applying some basic poetic-narratological aspects and by doing this the distance between ancient culture and today’s reader can be reduced. The interpretation of the novel starts with the most important questions expressed in the prologue (prooimium): the unanimity and difference between the real and the fictional author/narrator; the role of intertextuality; the interconnection of word and image, the novel as ekphrasis; the understanding of the relation between nature (physis) and human creation (technē). Then it continues to explore the characters of the two protagonists, Daphnis and Chloe, the gods who have a role in their love and experiences (Eros, Pan, and Dionysus), the threatening external forces, and the most crucial questions of space, time and bucolic idyll. All these are subordinated to the most significant interpretational possibilities (the novel as the allegory of Love), which provides the opportunity to show the author’s, Longus’s, ironic perspective.