The mismatch, of course, has nothing to do with age difference per se (as most commentators oddly suggest that it does). The inappropriateness concerns the fact that Octavian (besides being stupid) is much too young for a mature relationship.

So here’s the subtle lie: a lonely aging woman, in an unhappy marriage, described as beautiful, cannot find an interesting lover. All she can find is a hormonal boy who would sleep with anyone, and she takes what she can get. Strauss’s subtle lie is that a wise aging woman will naturally make a staggeringly inappropriate erotic choice, jettisoning the search for love in a desperate burst of sexual eagerness. And then, being wise, she will give that up and become resigned to a sexless life — apparently because no male not totally preoccupied with teenage hormonal excess will look in her direction. That’s not just a lie, it’s a generative lie, since when people come to believe it, it informs life.

Now we arrive at a third lie, the subtlest of all. The lie is that it is only in this form — where the aging woman makes a terrible choice, and then comes to her senses and renounces that choice — that an audience will accept the representation of the sex life and emotions of an aging woman. In other words, the aging woman has to be punished — and doubly punished, first by being thrust into a stupid and shallow relationship, and then by being made to give it up with high-minded talk about time and inevitability. It is very like the old days in which gay male relationships in fiction had to end with a death. Audiences wanted to punish gay men; they disapproved, and wanted novelists to register that disapproval. Audiences then and now want to punish the aging woman, and thus, aided by Strauss, they construct an aesthetic fiction of the “inevitability” of her renunciation and the “profound wisdom” of her acceptance.

Is this third lie, however, a lie? Is it really possible, audiences being what they are, to represent the sexual/romantic choices of an aging woman attractively, showing her making a good and interesting choice, and then being happy in that choice? To see that the answer to this question is “yes,” we need only turn to Shakespeare, and “Antony and Cleopatra” (1606). Of course, Shakespeare had history at his back, and Cleopatra is one of history’s most fascinating women. Her love affair with Antony was real, and lasted until death. Shakespeare had lived by then through the remarkable reign of a female monarch, Elizabeth, who died in 1603, and who was believed by many to have had a longtime lover; so he knew he could carry his audience with such a tale.

Unlike the dreamy abstractions of the youthful love in “Romeo and Juliet,” “Antony and Cleopatra” depicts what we might call mature love — love between people who enjoy being grown-ups together and who have no desire to transcend human life, because they are having too much fun in life as it is.

Romeo and Juliet don’t eat; Antony and Cleopatra eat all the time. Romeo and Juliet have no occupation; Antony and Cleopatra are friends and supportive colleagues with a great deal of work to do running their respective and interlocking empires. Romeo and Juliet have no sense of humor; Antony and Cleopatra live by elaborate jokes and highly personal forms of teasing. (“That time, — Oh times! — I laugh’d him out of patience …”) Romeo and Juliet, utterly absorbed, pay no attention to others around them; Antony and Cleopatra love to gossip about the odd people in their world, spend evenings wandering the streets, watching the funny things people do, structuring love through daily life. Romeo and Juliet speak in terms of worshipful hyperbole. Antony knows how to make contact with Cleopatra through insults, even about her age; she knows how to turn a story about a fishhook into a running joke that renews laughter each time it is mentioned.