In Book II of the New Arcadia – at one of the relatively rare points in the narrative where the story surfaces into the present moment amid the extended circumlocutions, inset narrations, and tales within tales that largely make up the bulk of Book II – Zelmane (whose own body remains decorously veiled) sings a lengthy blazon on the beautiful Philoclea (who, having recently disrobed, is, together with her sister, Pamela, bathing naked in the river Ladon), giving us what is, on the face of it, a highly erotic scene between two women, one of whom is ecstatically praising the body of the other. This is not to deny that Zelmane is, of course, a highly ambiguous figure. At one level, what lies beneath her costume is none other than the all too male Pyrocles who has donned that disguise with the sole aim of gaining access to just such scenes as this. On the other hand, Sidney's text goes out of its way to ambiguate such a figure and to problematize – or at the very least to qualify – any claim it may have to a straightforwardly heroic masculinity. The first time Pyrocles is presented to us – long before he has gone anywhere near an Amazon disguise – he is introduced as ‘a young man (at least, if he were a man)’, and, shortly after (under the name of ‘Daiphantus’), he is described as a figure who had ‘no hair of his face to witness him a man’ who had yet performed deeds ‘beyond the degree of a man’.