Longus

Longus is a Greek prose writer of whom nothing is certainly known beyond his name and his book. He is placed in the 2nd century AD, perhaps at the end of it, and he is thought to have written in the Greek East; his own words in the proem are the only testimony to any life behind the text.

His one surviving work, Daphnis and Chloe, in four books, tells of two foundlings raised by a goatherd and a shepherd on Lesbos who grow up together and learn what love is. It is the founding pastoral romance of European literature, shaped by Theocritus and by the Greek novel, and it handed its country setting and its innocent lovers to later writers and painters.