Nothing is known about Longus. His name appears on the manuscripts of Daphnis and Chloe and nowhere else, and the guesses about him — that he lived on Lesbos, that he wrote in the second or early third century AD — are inferences from the book itself. Daphnis and Chloe is the most influential of the five surviving Greek novels and the least like the others. Instead of shipwrecks and abductions strung across the Mediterranean, it stays on one Lesbian estate through four cycles of seasons, and its plot is simply that two foundlings raised by shepherds fall in love and cannot work out what to do about it. The comedy and the tenderness both come from their ignorance; the seasons supply the structure and the metaphor. The book invented the pastoral romance as later Europe understood it. Amyot's French translation of 1559 made it famous, and it fed Sidney, Shakespeare's late romances, Goethe's admiration, Ravel's ballet and Chagall's lithographs. The prose is built on careful rhythmic balance, which is why translators struggle with it.