many homosexuals in so many different ages and places, but for another reason. It suggests another mode of sexual intercouse amongst Greek homosexuals aside from the more traditional one, a pattern that while not uncommon at all times, has no universally-agreed name, and generally escapes all the sexology books.

All so far has taken place in the first third of the book. Although the two homosexual characters, Clinias and Menelaus, continue to play important roles in the story, their homosexuality plays no further part and the only subsequent homosexual references do not concern them.

To continue with a summary of the plot, the vessel is shipwrecked on the way to Alexandria. The two lovers and Menelaus are separated from Clinias, and reaching shore, take another vessel up the Nile. They are attacked by pirates, who in turn are attacked by Egyptian troops, in the course of which the lovers are separated. Leucippe suffers one of her many hair-breadth escapes from a horrible death, being saved by the ingenuity of Menelaus. Further trouble ensues when the Egyptian commander, and two of his followers, get terribly excited by the beauty of Leucippe. A forerunner of the virtuous but very self-assertive American girl, she has decided all troubles arise from her near-lapse in Tyre from virtue, and is determined. that she'd rather die than lose it, to anyone including Clitophon until he's properly married to her.

In the course of another escape, pirates again strike, Leucippe is carried off, and Clitophon from a pursuing vessel sees the beheading of what appears to be his beloved. He returns to Alexandria in despair, and after some months, yields to the advice to "give in" to a young, beautiful and rich Ephesian widow who's mad about him, named Melitta. The ad-

vice in this heterosexual matter comes again from his old buddy Clinias, whom he has now met again, he having also survived the wreck those many months previously.

On the way to Ephesus, and there, our hero, like his virtuous Leucippe, keeps resisting the efforts of his sexy fiance, and later wife, to get him to bed. Especially after he discovers that Leucippe is alive, it having been a whore in her clothing who was beheaded. Leucippe is in fact a slave of Melitta. The plot further thickens into a French-type bedroom farce when Melitta's supposedly shipwrecked husband, the handsome Thersander, returns home. In the course of intrigues both Leucippe and Clitophon are in and out of various confinements, and finally there is a court trial, of the "spicy divorce for adultery" type. In the course of the trial, our hero is accused of being a husband to every woman and wife to every man (as said of Caesar) and his attorney in turn im-. plies that in his youth Thersander was just about the swishiest male prostitute in all the dives of Ephesus. Nothing in the story indicates any justification for either of these charges.

Finally, everything begins to work out when a magic-type test proves our heroine's chastity. All things are explained and cleared up, the couple secure the parental blessings for their marriage, and all return home to live happily ever after.

As we indicated at the beginning this is one of the most readable of all the ancient Greek novels, with many exceedingly "modern" aspects, and offers many reasons for a popular new translation to be made available to a wide public. In the light of recent literary trends, no argument to the contrary can be based merely on its powerful homosexual passages.