“Towards the end of the term they touched upon a yet more delicate subject. They attended the Dean’s translation class, and when one of the men was forging quietly ahead Mr Cornwallis observed in a flat toneless voice: ‘Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.’ Durham observed afterwards that he ought to lose his fellowship for such hypocrisy.
Maurice laughed.
’I regard it as a point of pure scholarship. The Greeks, or more of them, were that way inclined and to omit it is to omit the mainstay of Athenian society’…’You’ve read the Symposium?’…’He was free of another subject, and one that he had never mentioned to any living soul. He hadn’t known it could be mentioned, and when Durham did so in the middle of the sunlit court a breath of liberty touched him."From the semi-autobiographical novel Maurice by E.M. Forster.
Completed : 1914
Published : Posthumously, 1971