The answer is obvious. Yet the means by which this much-oppressed, greatly-feared human force returns (for it can never be completely cast out, so long as we remain human) is another question. In a society built on materialism, usury and propaganda, in which the erotic is suspect, Eros cannot flower naturally: it manifests itself in more or less debased forms. (See Marcuse's classic treatment, "Eros and Civilization")

I think it is an intuition of this dilemma which makes the editors somewhat uneasy when confronted with the physical aspects of these "Passionate friendships". They range in time from the romance of David and Jonathan in the Bible of the Jews and that of Achilles and Patroklus in the Bible of the Greeks, down to the mythical universe of Proust and the smaller, more sardonic world of Roger Peyrefitte, a selection from whose masterpiece, "Special Friendships", concludes the book.

The sexual mores of the ancients are familiar enough to us. In this, as in so many things, it is the Greeks who represent an ideal, lost humanism-lost to us as well as to the Romans, whose more spurious sophistication seems closer to the temper of the present age.

When we turn from the classic to the medieval, however, we find that the latter period was not so dark as it has been depicted, despite the pernicious doctrines of the Early Church (the inheritance of Jewish tribal law, according to which homosexual activity was punishable, in theory at least, by stoning to death). Just as the historian of the future will be able to deduce the incidence of homosexuality in our society from a study of the grotesque laws that punish and attempt to prohibit it, so we may do likewise, reading of the monastic codes and the whimsical system of penances: "Cummean boys under twenty who kiss must keep six special

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fasts, and if they do so licentiously eight, and if with embraces ten." And we must remember that this was the age of Charlemagne, who cultivated poet-scholars and traveling musicians, among whom the tradition of "Greek love" was very much alive, as it was to continue into Renaissance times.

I have only praise for the catholicity of the editors' taste and for the high literary quality of the selections. Here is delight and enlightenmentinformation about which the usual college professor of obfuscation is silent, either through ignorance or through fear of violating the taboos which it is the business of an educator to be attacking with all his intellectual powers. It has been easier, for instance, to hear about Byron's incestuous involvement with his sistera taboo which might have some justification biologically (although belied by the brilliant results achieved by forced brother-sister marriages in the great Egyptian dynasties)-easier to learn of this "scandal" than it has been to come across a reference to this great Romantic's interest in his own sex, a subject covered by a taboo that has no biological or any other justification. The editors bring light to this aspect of Byron, especially in regard to his infatuation with the Greek boy, Loukas, who was the inspiration of many of the poet's last works. Through his letters, we also read of beloved Thomas Gray's pathetic involvement, at the age of fiftythree, with the "gay young Swiss" whom he described thus: "Was never such a gracious Creature born!"

Aside from the aesthetic charm of such testaments as this-testaments of the "living dead" whose example may sustain us in our daily living, the anthology is useful in tracing the history of the "problem of the heterosexual". That is, these documents may be read dialectically, as reflections of the changes in the dominant group's official attitudes toward the homo-

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