The Greek Life of Oscar Wilde

Abstract

Oscar Wilde remembered that it was at the age of 16 that ‘the wonder and beauty of Greek life began to dawn’ upon him: ‘I began to read Greek eagerly […], and the more I read the more I was enthralled.’2 Frank Harris, who reports this story is a notoriously unreliable source of anecdotes on a notoriously unreliable raconteur. But Wilde’s brilliant academic career proves that there must have been at least some truth in this one. After studying at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Wilde read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Oxford, winning prizes and distinctions in both universities. His first publication, in the November 1875 issue of the Dublin University Magazine, was an English rendition of the chorus of cloud-maidens in Aristophanes’ Clouds. And, from that moment onwards, Greek culture is a thread that runs through most of his writings, in the form of reference and allusion, as in his poetry, or philosophical speculation, as in his critical essays and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Greek culture is an influence not only on Wilde’s intellectual development, but also on his public work, as well as his private codes of self-understanding and his incessant experiments in self-styling. Ancient Greece is the foundation on which Wilde’s identity as aesthete, critic, and writer is built. It is a constant presence in his oeuvre, even when its solid features become harder to discern in the midst of the labyrinthine arguments of Wilde’s philosophical provocations.