Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/309

 satire and heterosexualism and fougue of that remarkable social study, we discern a subtle sympathy, an earnest concept of love for the boy Giton. The story's real action condenses in the furious jealousy of the hero Encolpius and his companion Ascyltos, for the favours of Giton. The passing-over of the lad, now to one rival now to another, with a hint of his boyish constancy of heart for Encolpius, is the theme that holds the loose texture of the tale together. Giton rather wins us, spite of his effeminateness, and his want of moral fibre. The lively story is Greek, rather than Latin, in this quality.

In a finer instance of Latin novel-writing, "The Metamorphoses; or The golden Ass" of Apuleius, occur passages referring us to pederastic uranism, hellenic in suggestion. We know no more of Apuleius sexually than of Petronius; but we are informed that he gave over a wild life to marry for money, unsuccessfully—in which sacrifice he was not in the end more fortunate than are many men, homosexual or dionysian!

Nothing in the recitals of such historians or philosophers as Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lampridius, Dion Cassius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Sallust and so, gives us indication that they were uranistic. They rebuke its sentiment as coarsened, venalized. But they are nowhere strong moralists against it. Suetonius depicts imperial homosexualism in decadent Rome with only capricious austerity.



Under the Byzantire Empire homosexualism pervaded more or less decadent Greek or Latin literature, to an almost unlimited degree; as did every shade of uranianism—especially pederasty, boy-love, and the sexual interest in the ephebus—pervade the Eastern Empire. Byzantium was saturated with