This volume asks how has the ancient pederastic teaching scene exemplified the production and transference of knowledge from one generation to the next (p. 4), and what the relationship is between knowledge and pederastic desire. O.’s chronological limits are 1750–1930, distinct periods of Philhellenism in German and British intellectual history. O. evaluates scholarly historical accounts of ancient Greek pederasty and the consequences of those accounts within the exclusively homosocial environment of the German universities and Oxbridge colleges (p. 192).
Chapter 1, ‘Paiderastia and the Contexts of German Historicism’, looks at German classical scholar Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761) and his fascination with Socrates, and examines the fine line between pederastic pedagogy and pedagogic pederasty. Gesner was uncomfortable with Socrates’ homoerotic desires, and ultimately convinced himself of Socrates’ sexual continence and purity. This chapter also examines Karl Otfried Müller's 1824 History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, in which pederasty is something specific to the Doric civilisation, and which is much concerned with racial stereotypes. In addition, the chapter considers Eduard Meier's 1837 encyclopedia entry on ‘Päderastie’, ‘the first piece of modern scholarship to collect as much knowledge about Greek pederasty as possible’ (p. 88), but in the end Meier argued for the peculiarity of the Greeks in order to bolster notions of nineteenth-century family domesticity. All in all, Greek pederasty tested ‘the limits of nineteenth century German positivist historicism’ (p. 82).
Chapter 2, ‘Translating the Love of Philosophy: Jowett and Pater on Plato’, turns to England, and looks first at Benjamin Jowett (1817–1873: tutor, administrative reformer, theologian, translator of Plato) and his educational philosophies and policies. Jowett added Plato to the Greats curriculum at Oxford in 1850 and espoused deep, non-sexual friendships between males. For the essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–1894), however, Greek homoeroticism becomes the key trope for exploring the relationship between the past and the present. For instance, it becomes clear that in his 1867 essay ‘Winckelmann’, the homoerotic response of Winckelmann to Greek art was central to Pater's understanding of the reception of antiquity in modernity. All in all, however, ‘the relationship between Platonic eros and truth was a complex one for Jowett and Pater’ (p. 107).
Chapter 3, ‘The Case of John Addington Symonds’, explores the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), a pupil of Jowett, whose memoirs document well nineteenth-century homoeroticism. For Symonds, Plato's dialogues produced ‘the inner truth of sexuality’; when he read the Phaedrus and the Symposium ‘it was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato’ (p. 154). For Symonds it was impossible to think of modern masculinity without reference to classical culture, and he mythologised the ancient Athenians so as to understand the reality of his sexual and social desires. In this chapter, O. also points out that Symonds's history of Greek love, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873), engaged with medical theories of sexuality (it was appended to Henry Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion [1897; p. 184]).
In Chapter 4, ‘Trying Greek Love: Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster's Maurice’, O. discusses how Wilde (1854–1900) has been appropriated by later thinkers/historians as both the progenitor of modern homosexuality and the ironic, sexual dissident that questions the reification of sexual identity. Wilde redefined the Platonic model by turning to Christ and his relations with men and, along with many Victorian scholars, sought to locate Christ within Greek antiquity (claiming he spoke Greek, for example), thus distancing Christ from the Semitic world. O. then turns to E.M. Forster's Maurice (written 1913–14 and published in 1971 after his death). Maurice's difficult relationship with classics is a recurring subject in the novel and he reads Plato as valorising physical as well as spiritual desire which is, O. argues, ultimately why his relationship with Clive fails.
Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Freud and the History of Masculinity: between Oedipus and Narcissus’. Havelock Ellis’ relatively objective 1897 work Sexual Inversion (with an appendix by Symonds, as noted above) was one of the best-known works at that time on same-sex desire. Ellis believed that ‘the truth of one's self, the truth of one's self-understanding, lay in the comprehension of one's sexual desires’ (p. 235). But Ellis was quickly eclipsed by Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. Ellis believed male homosexuality was congenital; Freud's model was very different. For Freud, a man's sexuality was created by his past. Thus in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his On Narcissism: an Introduction (1914), the Greek myths of Oedipus and Narcissus exemplify what masculinity is: Oedipus shows how we identify with an undesirable past, and Narcissus’ tale shows us that when we look back to the past and desire its otherness, we will really be looking at ourselves. Thus for Freud, a man's sexual desires were ‘a strange, irrecoverable past, at the same time profoundly influential on his present’ (p. 263).
The writers O. examines ‘continually questioned the knowability of one's desires’, and a number of intellectuals questioned the equation between ‘Greek love’ and ‘homosexual’ (p. 266). As O. points out, Greek love did not straightforwardly reflect the ‘truths’ of the sexologist or legal practitioner, and was not comprehensible within modern legal and medical frameworks (ibid). Greek pederasty in fact became one of the most difficult of questions for those writers interested in reifying the nature of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. The conclusion, ‘The Truth of Erôs and the Erôs for Truth’, examines two modern thinkers on Greek love: James Davidson and Michel Foucault. In his History of Sexuality, vol. 2: the Use of Pleasure (1984), Foucault suspends himself between history and philosophy: the history of classical Greek culture and the origins of modern philosophical discourse. Scholars differ as to whether he was a positive and important moment in postmodern thought, questioning repressive labels of selfhood and sexuality, or if his Greeks and Romans are projections of Enlightenment ideals onto the past. In The Greeks and Greek Love: a Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (2007), Davidson tries to historicise Greek love as comprehensively as possible, but it is clear he is also politically invested in his own idealisation of the Greeks. O. concludes that ‘the use of a classical past to craft the present needs to confront the history of the uses of that classical past. It is our neo-humanistic “heritage” that makes the Greeks seem so close and so distant from us’ (p. 274).
This is a book for the specialist reader on classical reception, a reader with a knowledge of intellectual movements in German and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the poets, historians, psychiatrists and philosophers of those time periods. O. displays considerable understanding of Freud, Jowett, Pater, etc., but at the same time assumes a great deal of knowledge; the less learned reader may founder. This is a densely written book, but elegantly constructed, and a valuable one for classical reception studies.
