A literary companion to sex? Surely one wants more than that. A fleshly one, for instance. A lively one. A sassy, compassionate, flirtatious, even— heaven forbid— a witty one. But a literary one? Sounds a bit, or a smack, stuffy, yet in an age capable of producing anthologies of such trivia as excitingly shaped ice cubes and Berlin aphorisms (“Doof bleibt doof, da helfen keine Pillen” [Dumb is dumb, and pills won't help]), this one at least weighs in as dealing with what matters.

Or what matters to quite a few people. Probably not everyone— one hesitates to say everybody— cares about sex. Anti- pornography fanatics and the extremely young, boys especially, still turn gloomy or look piqued when it is mentioned. The ascetics among us of course care more about sex than most people, if only because they devote their entire lives to avoiding it, a signal, surely, of a senseless obsession, like struggling to sidestep summer breezes, or trying not to think about elephants. Sir Isaac Newton was apparently more impressed with geometry than sex. Goethe liked sex, but picked up his actual experience of it only in his late thirties or early forties, after which he wrote about it with enthusiasm and brilliance in his “Roman Elegies” and “The Diary,” neither of which is included in Pitt- Kethley's anthology. Montaigne, who is also not included, spoke about sex at length, but regarded it with urbanity as “nothing but the thirst for enjoying the desired object,” and a “ridiculous titillation.” The ancient Romans and Greeks— Sappho, Ovid, Catullus and Petronius aside— found it less important than war, politics (which they did not confuse with sex), food, furniture and the weather. Love dallies temptingly through the pages of the few ancient Roman novels that have survived, such as Daphnis and Chloe, but love is not sex, at least as Pitt- Kethley wants us to think about sex, and sex itself merely peeks into Longus's final scenes. Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, offers a bit more than this, a frolicsome get- together between an ass and a beautiful woman, but startling though the ass finds this encounter, it fascinates him less than the chance to regain his human form (lost through a combination of lechery and witchcraft) and his vigilant if dull hope of piety.