Abstract

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, writers used to celebrate the Sacred Band of Thebes, that singular group of Greek warriors whose bravery in battle was as intense as their love for each other. Love in such an all-male milieu, however, is a theme that has usually been avoided by modern writers who hope to be taken seriously, with the exception of British memoirists recalling schoolboy crushes or Jean Genet glorying in prison life. Nonetheless, over the past hundred years, there have been variations on the theme of an attachment between a military officer and his subordinate in several well-known stories and novels. Herman Melville and D. H. Lawrence approached this theme in Billy Budd (1891) and Prussian Officer (London: Duckworth & Co., 1914), and the motif was developed in the 40's by Carson McCullers in Reflections in a Golden Eye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), in the 50's by Dennis Murphy in The Sergeant (New York: Viking, 1958) and in the 60's by James Purdy in Eustace Chisholm and the Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1967). While from a literary point of view the archetypal repetitions are interesting, what is more interesting from the