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This is a monumental work, reminiscent of E. R. Curtius or Erich Auerbach in its scope and erudition. Hagstrum has written a book which consistently impresses and amazes the reader with its historical range, interpretive subtlety, and lively style. Hagstrum's subject is announced as “the couple,” from antiquity to the 17th century, but such a topic comprises nothing less than the history of love (heterosexual and homosexual), the history of marriage, and the relative (and sometimes competing) status of such concepts as libido, affection, eros, friendship, and agape throughout Western civilization. Though Hagstrum bases his argument in the literary context of each period he studies—and he covers virtually everything from antiquity through Greece, Rome, the Hebrew and Christian bibles, the early Christian church, and the Middle Ages to the Renaissance—he also provides excursions into social history, visual art, anthropology, and theology in his discussion of the evolving representation of different attitudes toward love and marriage. The central question to which Hagstrum returns is whether friendship and sex (or “esteem” and “desire,” as his title's allusion to Thomson's The Seasons puts it) can coexist in a human relationship such as marriage. Hagstrum believes and hopes that they can, but a great deal of the book demonstrates how such an ideal of marriage, one that is perhaps taken for granted today, was not always the norm in earlier societies, and sometimes had to vie with alternate expressions (homosexual or pederastic) of sexual desire.
Beginning with a series of chapters on archaic, Greek, and Roman culture, Hagstrum discusses an astonishing, and always provocative, range of authors, texts, and issues, including speculative reconstructions of matriarchal and patriarchal societies;