Preface:
The following story was submitted for publication to the NAMBLA Journal by Robert Meriwether Wren, then Professor of English at the University of Houston, under the pen name Robert Campbell. However, following his death just afterwards in a plane crash of 11 June 1989, it was instead published in the NAMBLA Bulletins of that month (Volume X No. 6, pp. 12-16) and October 1989 (Volume X No. 8, pp. 6-12). Several misprints have been corrected in what follows.
The prefaratory note confused some readers into supposing that the story really had been written for “Campbell” by his father (implicitly in about 1942), leading the editor of the Bulletin to clarify:
the notion that this was a story written by Campbell’s father for his fourteen-year-old son is part of the fiction, not an author’s note or autobiographical information separate from the story.[1]
As stated in the opening sentence, the story is taken from a true one recounted by Xenophon in his book about “The Persian Expedition” (Anabasis VII 4 vii-viii). However, liberties have been taken with that story, which took place in 399 BC. Though one of the protagonists was indeed a boy-loving Olynthian mercenary captain called Episthenes, Xenophon did not record the boy’s name, and the scene has been transposed from Thrace to Samos.
