Frank Yerby has complained that 99 44/100 of his historical research lands on the cutting-room floor at Dial Press. If this is true, critical readers should thank the man with the scissors for sparing 56/100 in Goat Song….

[Goat Song is] the sordid story of Ariston, a Spartan-Macedonian bastard, who struggles to achieve happiness in Athens in the fifth century B.C. (p. 51)

As the plot of Goat Song is predictably familiar to Yerby's fans, so the philosophy repeats his characteristic themes….

[As usual,] Yerby concerns himself with the problems of an oppressed minority group whom he never fails to include in his novels despite his once-ardent protests of his indifference to discrimination. In this instance, the oppressed are slaves, Helots, who, Yerby argues, have lost their sense of personal responsibility as a natural consequence of slavery. They must be taught to regain their dignity, to act wisely, to control their passions, and to think for themselves. Otherwise, even if freed, they will act as slaves rather than as men.

Among so many familiar vistas stand a few that are unpleasantly new. The most obvious of these is the ugliness of the story. Rather than teasing his readers' sadistic sensibilities, Yerby tortuously details horrors more shocking and more sordid than any since Benton's Row. He does not merely describe Phryne's lynching once, he repeats the details…. Yerby proffers every salacious sliver of the night during which Ariston, half-asleep, mistakes his beautiful mother for a slave, rips her dress from her, nearly attacks her, then clings nakedly to her nakedness in grief and terror. I dare not count the numbers of times characters vomit…. If Yerby does not include all forms of perversion in Goat Song, he certainly emphasizes the most sadistic.

Yerby also seems more engrossed with homosexuality than in any earlier work. Yerby's thesis, of course, is that homosexuality as well as heterosexuality characterized the Hellenic states. Needless to say, he more than proves his point. (pp. 52, 81)

Paradoxically, however, Yerby does not attribute homosexual practices to most of the historical characters. To the contrary Yerby, sometimes disregarding scholarly surmise, has emphasized their heterosexuality. (p. 81)

If nothing existed in the book except the materials described thus far, the only readers would be those faithful fans whom Yerby has described as middle-aged ladies and sex-starved men. Fortunately, however, that scissors man in the cutting room at Dial spared 56/100 of the history. Athens of the fifth century B.C. comes alive, and the people assume a vigor far superior to the lifeless and sterile representations in the history texts.

I have been reading about Athens and Sparta for most of my life, but I never before felt their realities completely as in this book. Regrettably, however, I am not certain that Yerby fully realizes the details which inspire such an impression in his readers…. [The] Hellenes do not assume flesh from the mass of historical detail but from the very credible and vivid pictures of men in action—not Yerby's stereotyped heroes and the villains but the ordinary men.

I shall remember Yerby's description of the Spartan method of subduing an enemy…. I shall remember the famous men as Yerby described them…. If only one might keep the historical vignettes and throw away the rest!

Unless readers are made too squeamish by blood and vomit, Goat Song … will become a bestseller. The fact that he has written better—in Foxes of Harrow or The Saracen Blade or Captain Rebel—is not important to those who buy Yerby as regularly as they purchase a new calendar. (pp. 81-2)