From the surviving classical records of variance the policy of later censors is easy to deduce. Ovid’s tales stop short of objectionable detail and in any event include only mythical characters. Juvenal and Martial are vitriolic or contemptuous, Lucian and Alciphron are talking of courtesans. Sappho survives only in such fragments as were embedded in otherwise valued treatises. Any sympathetic treatments of lesbian love have been eradicated. Even in the few scattering survivals, however, we find a great variety of persons: goddess, empress, great literary artist, wealthy sophisticate, courtesan, and bucolic adolescent. Their experience ranges from depraved exhibitionism through proud assumption of masculinity or unashamed feminine passion, to naïve and troubled innocence (or in the case of Ruth to devotion unconscious of its own deeper significance.) All of these types of personality and experience recur often in later literature, in such guises that it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether they are grounded in observation of universal human behavior, or in admiring imitation of ancient models. CHAPTER II. FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE AGE OF REASON Introduction That no variant material remains from the ten centuries following Alciphron is hardly surprising, since so little record of any sort has survived. An oral literature of heroic tales and folk humor must have flourished throughout the Middle Ages; narratives in the earliest vernacular manuscripts bear many marks of such ancestry. But if anything was written down before the eleventh century it doubtless shared the fate of Charlemagne’s collection of Frankish tales, which were destroyed by his son, Louis the Pious, because of their pagan character.