Nothing is known about Longus. His name may indicate that he was a native of Italy who wrote in Greek.Paul Turner was born in 1917, and educated at Winchester and King’s College, Cambridge. He served in the RNVR (air branch) during the war, and then taught English literature at London, Cambridge, and Ankara universities, before joining the Oxford English Faculty in 1964. He is now an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He has published a volume on the Victorians in the Oxford History of English Literature, and his translations from Greek, Latin, and German include Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Lucian’s Satirical Sketches, and Ovid’s Art of Love. His critical biography of Thomas Hardy came out in 1998, and his edition of Robert Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology in 2001. In 2002 he was made an MBE.
