question today.

It has taken this novel to make me realize that what I have hitherto considered to be contradictory tendencies in the Greek attitude towards homosexual love are little more than the ambiguities of ordinary life. Although the Greeks frequently praised sexual passion they also counciled chastity. While every youth, the scholars tell us, considered it a disgrace not to have a lover, yet the boys were strictly chaperoned by their tutors.. It seems to me, after reading THE LAST OF THE WINE, that the only way the modern mind can understand the ancients' thinking about homosexuality is to construct a Hegelian triad with sexual love as one's thesis, chastity as the antithesis, and with a highly individualized and sensitively-variable synthesis of the two as outcome or end result. Be that as it may, Mary Renault is the first writer of our era, so far as I know, to take us into the lives and minds and hearts of Greek lovers, to show them to us in their natural habitat, and to make their experience fully and concretely understandable and plausible to us.

By focussing entirely on the homosexual side of Greek emotional life I have created an imbalance which is not true either to the Greeks or to the novel I am reviewing. One of the most appealing features of THE LAST OF THE WINE is the picture it gives us of a society based upon the fact of human bisexuality, showing forth the possibility of a sensitive, harmonious balance between the heterosexual and homosexual components of human nature, and the artificiality, the crudity of the view which insists that a man must either be the one thing or the other, either a lover of men or of women, when the truth about him is that the completest man is he who freely and with sincerity loves both. At the same time, Mary Renault shows us a world in which both exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality were tolerated and respected. It was not supposed that the sexual needs and tastes of all men were, or ought to be, the same. In the second place, the quality of a man and the quality of his beloved mattered more than the sex of the individuals.

The most dubious thing about the homosexual cause is that it is forced to defend sex-for-sex's-sake with no qualitative distinctions between honorable and dishonorable modes of loving, with no distinction between the self-respecting and the gutless, with no distinction between devotion and mere sensuality. Those wrapped up in the homosexual cause tend to lose sight of such distinctions, I believe. It is at least ridiculous to find oneself a "crusader" for kinds of love which are irresponsible and sordid as well as for love which is characterful and good. THE LAST OF THE WINE confronts us with such qualitative, ethical distinctions in such a way that few of us, perhaps, will be able to put the book down without a rather shamed realization of how far we have strayed from the standards of our youth while, at the same time, it restores our confidence in those standards and inspires us to rededicate ourselves to them.

I suppose I ought to mention the novel's few slight faults. They are relative faults which would not be apparent at all if the book were not so extraordinarily good. Well, Alexias seems to have too orderly a grasp, too clear a perspective of Athenian political and military affairs for a boy of fifteen. The relationship between Alexias and Lysis sometimes seems a little too noble to be true. When Lysis marries, Alexias conquers his quite understandable jealousy much too easily . . . It is said that love needs something to forgive. THE LAST OF THE WINE is a novel which it would be impossible not to love. It is easy to forgive faults which are only those of a fond parent who slightly overidealizes her children.

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