Certainly as an “anonymous but exact description of love” there are few passages in literature to rival Ruth’s appeal to Naomi beginning “Entreat me not to leave thee ...” To quote it is surely unnecessary, but let anyone who learned it in childhood, who has never subsequently considered it in the light of primitive tribal custom, reread it for the force of Ruth’s willingness to abandon not only her native soil and her own family but even her God and her hope of burial with her ancestors. The emotional significance of this passage is reinforced by three others in the story. Ruth and Orpah had been married “about ten years” at the time of their widowhood and of Naomi’s decision to return to Israel, so that Ruth was then at least in her twenties, and her devotion cannot be counted the clinging of a bereaved adolescent to her bridegroom’s mother. Orpah, moreover, remained in Moab without more than formal protest, and with apparently every prospect of finding a second husband there. Then when Boaz welcomed Ruth among his gleaners because “it hath fully been shewed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law,” the girl replied, “Let me find grace in thy sight, my lord, for that thou ... hast spoken to the heart of thy handmaiden.”[18] And, finally, when by carrying out implicitly Naomi’s clever scheme Ruth was taken as a wife and bore Boaz a son, “The women said to Naomi ... he shall be unto thee a restorer of life and a nourisher of thine old age; for thy daughter-in-law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath borne him.”[19] Viewed without prejudice, this is a masterly portrait of a somewhat passive young woman, twice playing the heterosexual role with success, but dominated by another love at least as compelling as that for the men she successively married. H. M. and Nora K. Chadwick in their _Growth of Literature_ point out that “it gives the impression of being written primarily for feminine circles,”[20] and by comparison with many treatments of the variant theme it might well also have been written _by_ a woman. * * * * * After Sappho’s poetry and this one Hebrew prose masterpiece, little that is pertinent to our subject remains from the half dozen centuries preceding the Christian era. That male homosexuality was, within limits, an approved pattern in Greek life, and that it occurred in Rome whether approved or not, especially under the later emperors, are now accepted facts. About its prevalence among women less is known. From Plato and Euripides to Ovid, women as individual personalities did not often figure in well-known classical writing, and of women writers, though Mary Beard enumerates references to an impressive number,[21] most traces have vanished. A few fragments, however, and a few allusions to works never recovered, indicate that female variance existed.