Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/301

 We have already spoken of important Latin belles-lettres, of the Imperial age. This finest period of literary Rome is highly eloquent of Uranian love; sometimes—largely—pederastic, sometimes of more dignified sort. The muse of Ovid sings of the diverse sexual loves, with Greek charm in uranian suggestions. The similisexual vignettes that occur in Vergil's Eclogues, imitations of Hellenic models in hoy-love, lyrics are doubtless personal to his own heart. The pederastic note, the voice of the poet in his own individuality, is unmistakeable. We find Vergil even more eloquent as to an heroic pair of young soldier-lovers, when he tells us the dramatic story of the friends, Nisus and Euryalus, in the Ninth Book of the Æneid:—

It is the uranian elegist that we hear in Vergil's splendid and skilfully patriotic eulogy of their affection and bravery:

But more vehement is the language of personal homosexualism met, the Uranian heard as a singer of his own love or lust, of his own bliss his own sorrow, or else as the mocking commentator on homosexualism in others, when we review such poets as Catullus, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Juvenal, Persius and Martial; the great social lyrists, elegists and satirists. Now refined, now grossly realistic, (even to being indecent as is no Hellenic poet) the whole