Greek Love Research Articles

"Boyish as a Ganymede": Greek Love and the Erotic Experiment in Jude the Obscure

Abstract: This article demonstrates the importance of Jude the Obscure's Oxford setting to Thomas Hardy's project of writing a novel of maturation that refuses to conclude with successful reproduction. Linking the character of Sue Bridehead with Hardy's interest in writing about Greek love by Oxford graduates, I show how Jude's coupling with Sue incites intellectual exploration rather than the reducing development to the ends of reproductive marriage or professional achievement. To narrate the effect of Sue's tutelage, I show, Hardy derails the novel's teleological progression in favor of a pastoral mode made possible by spaces where the couple can safely practice non-marital sexuality. By way of conclusion, I position Jude at the start of a queer pastoral tradition in British fiction in which setting is formally significant because of its historical significance to the sustainability of sexually nonnormative lives.

Yearning for the Plot Enclosure in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs

ABSTRACT The British Empire’s disintegration drove its many residents into an enclosure of illusions of sovereignty. As McEwan’s works emerged amid such developments, his characters respond to the rising disintegration either by imposing control patterns on others or by taking the needy into protection. The novel Black Dogs focuses on the protagonist-narrator Jeremy, who is determined to redeem his adoptive parents’ ruined familial intimacy. However, his considerate attitude to them is gradually disclosed by the author as an attempt to solidify his unbelonging self. His generous opening to them by means of a mobile plot that meanders through European history gradually turns into a self-protective consolidation. Indicatively, his plot’s sleepwalking through historical perils recalls the ancient Greek love romances, whose readers were equally frightened by the whims of an unchained history. Yet unlike them, who used to attach themselves to the ups and downs of the imperiled lovers, Jeremy’s addressees are attracted by his wandering plot that occupies the individual and collective territories of others. In a final twist, the author even surpasses this self-consolidating expansion into foreign territories by his clandestine plotting of an intertextual space and thus reveals the appropriative, conspirational character of his pact with the readers. A complicit alliance with them comes into being, which he keeps controlling and steering.

The theme of historical memory in a poem A.A. Akhmatova “Requiem”

At the turn of the last and the century before last, although not literally chronologically, on the eve of the revolution, in an era shaken by two world wars, perhaps the most significant female poetry in the entire world literature of the new time, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, arose and developed in Russia. The closest analogy that arose already among her first critics was the ancient Greek love singer Sappho: young Akhmatova was often called Russian Sappho. However, it is impossible to reduce all of Akhmatova's work to a love theme. There is also a clearly expressed patriotic orientation in it. Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem is a folk tragedy, which, in terms of its subject matter and issues, is still relevant today. They reflect the feelings of all people who have ever lost a loved one and experienced difficult historical events. This is a burning pain from injustice and a protest against violence against people, in particular against prisoners and people who survived the war. The lines of this work contain suffering from separation, but they allow you to share your sadness with others, let you see that you are not alone in your grief, which means that good will win and darkness is not eternal. In the center of the poem Requiem the lyrical heroine is a woman who stands idle in prison lines, waiting for her son's sentence, looking for a meeting with him. It is known that the son of Anna Andreevna was arrested twice. The second time he was sentenced to exile in Siberia for 10 years. The queues under the prisons testified that there were a lot of mothers, wives, sisters who survived the loss. Describing her experiences, Anna Andreevna showed the grief of all women.

«Something else too abominable to be nam'd». David Hume and Greek Love

«Greek Love is a modern invention», asserts the classical scholar. David Hume can claim the title of inventor. In his 1751 Dialogue on morals he used the phrase to account for the relationship between a university boy and a man of merit. How did Hume come to this expression? Pederasty was a traditional sceptical topic against a universal standard for morals. What did Hume think of this practice and its origin? When he accounts for pederasty and homosocial arrangements by negative epithets, is Hume seriously condemning them or he is «only» and prudentially following the common use? The Article tries to give a first answer to these questions by examining Hume's writings and their sources (Plato, Plutarch, Cornelius Nepos and Cicero), and the views of the modern authors (Hobbes, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Charlemont, Smollet and Voltaire). The Article delineates the eighteenth-century debate, without projecting on it our views, and maintains that, like some ancient philosophers according to Sextus Empricus, and possibly like Smith, Hume would have declared practice in itself «indifferent».

Shelley's Quest for Love: Queering Epipsychidion

This paper employs the concept of queer to examine Percy Bysshe Shelley's Epipsychidion. Shelley's idealism towards love was widely received in atheism, materialism and Platonism. Compared with other Romantic poets, Shelley exercised his concept of love very differently. Shelley's quest for love is particularly discussed in most of his love poems. Among them Epipsychidion is a long poem that Shelley wrote to demonstrate his philosophy of love. In his later life, Shelley worked on translating Plato's philosophy, particularly The Symposium, which partly focuses on Greek love, and further pondered on his own sexuality. Shelley started to draw on atheistic materialism and Platonic metaphysics. Epipsychidion extends Shelley's early concept of love, namely "a soul within our soul," and dramatizes his narrator's love towards a female character named Emily. Different from major perspectives from Shelley critics (Notopoulos, Wasserman, Sperry, Peterfreud) who particularly pay attention to Shelley's love affairs, heterosexuality, as well as the real identity of Emily in Epipsychidion, the paper instead focuses on this poem to testify Shelley's homosexuality. The closeted poet honestly, but vaguely, discloses his traumatic love towards his male "Emily" and eventually his potential suicide with the man. I argue that a queer reading of Shelley's poetry helps to reexamine Shelley's philosophy of love in Epipsychidion.

Aeneas barátai a régi magyar irodalomban

In this paper I discuss the appearance of four figures (Euryalus, Nisus, Achates and Palinurus) taken from Virgil’s Aeneid in old Hungarian poetry (16‒18th centuries). I list all places these minor heroes are mentioned in the corpus represented by Régi Magyar Költők Tára series. I argue that the four heroes’ limited appearance in old Hungarian poetry was due to two factors: metaphorical usage of their figures and tabooization of homosexuality. Moreover, all the places in whom a figure called Eurialus is mentioned in the old Hungarian corpus, allude to the male protagonist of Eneas Silvius Piccolomini’s love story, the Historia de duobus amantibus and to its early translation in Hungarian. In old Hungarian literature Eurialus denoted a heterosexual male hero rather than an eromenos of Greek love tradition.

Greek nationhood and ‘Greek love’: sexualizing the nation and multiple readings of the glorious Greek past

AbstractThe paper addresses the ways in which the idea of homosexuality has been expelled from local dominant narrations about the Modern Greek nation and seeks to culturally frame this historical erasure. The ancient past and Ottoman rule are viewed as the two key moments of negotiating (and repeatedly placing in oblivion) any link between ‘Greekness’ and homoeroticism. Placing this institutional silence in juxtaposition to multiple Western readings of ‘Greek love’, the study provides ethnographic instances that reveal the appropriations of the Western gaze and moments of breaking the silence about Greek homosexuality. Selected individuals and cultural locales serve as terrains of negotiating the present‐day Greek state's façade as cosmopolitan, Western and post‐modern. On the one hand, Greece is perpetually re‐constituted as a topos, appropriate(d) for projections of varying versions of history‐telling from Western and local agents alike; on the other hand, homoeroticism is being negotiated through consecutive articulations of Greekness in past and present tense.

Ancient Sex: New Essays by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand

414 PHOENIX of athletes (71–72) and offers an instructive analysis of Plutarch’s two versions of how the bad news travelled from Sicily to Athens (75–78). She outlines how festivals for the same divinities or in memory of the same triumphs or featuring the same events helped fashion an interwoven network of the fractious communities of the Greek world (216–219). The race in armour is (rightly) said to appear on so many vases because of its artistic possibilities—this is not an index of its popularity or its prestige (165). The presentation is clear, with many sub-headings in each chapter and plenty of crossreferences ; there are indexes of names and of subjects (the latter explaining Greek terms, making the book accessible even to non-specialists); typos are few. Eleven illustrations buttress observations on art. Nonetheless, some questions remain. What are we to make of those who questioned or denied or ridiculed the connection of sport with war, not just intellectuals (Xenophanes) and characters invented by them (in Euripides’ Autolycus) but, so it is said, commanders themselves (Epaminondas, Philopoemen)? Why do festivals that honour them or their victories (Sparta’s Lysandreia, the Soteria at Delphi) often feature competitions in mousikē too? Why do sport and war so often seem out of step? Hoplite warfare did not bring team sports into the panhellenic festivals, nor did the increasing importance of naval warfare introduce boat races. The Homeric ethos and example may provide sufficient reason. But why, in that case, were some events that were good enough for Iliad’s warriors—archery, mock battle—also absent from major festivals and why did the two-horse chariot, used by them in battle and in sport, find a place in the Olympic program only at the end of the fifth century? Indeed, why does Homer have Epeius, one of the contestants in the boxing match at Patroclus’ games, admit that he is a poor soldier? As for that most military of Olympic events, the race in armour: it had been added over a century before the two-horse chariot race, but that too was relatively late, given the link of soldier and athlete on which Angeli Bernardini insists. Such questions do not invalidate her approach, focused as it is on ideology above all. But they perhaps remind us how poorly ideology may fit with practice. University of Winnipeg Mark Golden Ancient Sex: New Essays. Edited by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 342. With the publication of Kenneth Dover’s and Michel Foucault’s books on the history of sexuality, the subject became a central concern for classicists. Volumes such as Before Sexuality examined, developed, and refined Dover’s and Foucault’s arguments.1 Others were much more critical of the Dover/Foucault axis. Amy Richlin, for instance, questioned Foucault’s argument about ancient acts and ancient identities, and James Davidson argued that Dover and Foucault were much too phallocentric.2 The debates, sometimes fierce, other times humorous, found a context when AIDS was ravaging the gay community in the 1980s and early to mid ’90s. Whether ancient Greeks could be gay, or 1 K. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA 1978); M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3 vols.; Harmondsworth 1978–1986); D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.), BeforeSexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton 1990). 2 A. Richlin, “Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993) 523–573; J. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London 2007). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 not, simply mattered. What it meant to have a gay heritage was a concern of profound significance at a time when AIDS seemed genocidal: how to remember so many who were once part of our present and are now consigned to the past? As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick memorably put it, gay and queer people “have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or...

Desire under the Magnolias

Desire under the Magnolias Gary Richards (bio) William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker. By Benjamin E. Wise. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012. x + 355 pp. $35 cloth. Ebook available. Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire over Protest. By Michael S. D. Hooper. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. vii + 251 pp. $109.99 cloth. Ebook available. Desire and the Divine: Feminine Identity in White Southern Women’s Writing. By Kathaleen E. Amende. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2013. x + 162 pp. $35 cloth. Ebook available. “Desire,” Kathaleen Amende notes early in her study, “is a tricky thing.” Much of its trickiness, of course, arises from its circulation within myriad contexts contingent on historical and geographical specificities and cultural preoccupations. Recent southern literary studies have worked to map the nuances of these contexts in which desire circulates and is represented, as evinced by, among others, Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009) and Tison Pugh’s Queer Chivalry (2013), which interrogate desire’s relationships within literary representations to the southern plantation system and the southern investment in medievalism respectively. The three works under review [End Page 129] here range across the twentieth century and add to this exploration. Through writings by and about William Alexander Percy (1885 –1942), historian and biographer Benjamin Wise charts the relation of male sex-same desire to the white southern aristocracy of the early twentieth century. Through an exhaustive survey of the drama and fiction of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), literary critic Michael Hooper interrogates the relation of desire within this corpus to the political activism of the mid-twentieth century. And, through texts by Dorothy Allison, Rosemary Daniell, Connie May Fowler, Valerie Martin, Sheri Reynolds, and Lee Smith, literary critic Kathaleen Amende teases out the relation of contemporary white women’s desire to southern religious beliefs and structures of the late twentieth century. Made eminently readable by its clear prose, narrow focus, and linear narrative, Wise’s biography deftly sketches Percy’s evolving roles: son, gentleman lawyer, poet, soldier during World War I, civic organizer during the 1927 Mississippi River flood, adoptive father of his orphaned cousins in the 1930s. However, unlike scholars who dismiss Percy as anxiously discomforted by his queer sexuality, including McKay Jenkins, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Richard King, and John Barry, Wise charts within these roles the impact of Percy’s desire for other men. In particular, Wise crucially historicizes Percy’s understanding of male homosexuality “as a superior form of love” that emerged from the late nineteenth-century Hellenism he encountered at the University of the South and at Harvard, the elite educational institutions he attended between 1900 and 1908. In these erotically charged all-male arenas, Percy mastered “a coded vocabulary” that allowed him to speak fluently and openly “the idiom of Greek love.” Nowhere is this clearer than in his poetry, the significance of which, for Wise, “lies not so much in its literary achievement as its personal honesty and its use of coded, historically specific homoerotic idiom.” Percy’s diaries and correspondence—even within a carefully expurgated archive, as Wise’s epilogue discusses—reinforce this fluency. So too does Lanterns on the Levee (1941), which “offers a coded narration of Percy’s sexual awakening in Sewanee, an affirming description of Greek ‘bisexuality,’ and homoerotic descriptions of men.” Wise, however, rightly guards against overemphasizing this melancholic text written late in Percy’s life. Especially when contextualized within his close relationships with other gay or bisexual men—Huger Jervey, Sinkler Manning, Lindley Hubbell, Tommy Shields, Norman Douglas, Harry Stack Sullivan, Witter Bynner, Leon Koury, Gerstle [End Page 130] Mack—and Percy’s lifetime of frequenting sites of queer sexual freedom, such as Taormina and Capri, these written expressions allow Wise to conclude that “Percy wrote what amounted to a meditation on queer desire, complete with the mourning of its nonacceptance in contemporary society.” As the biography documents, Percy “immersed himself in conversations and reading about sexuality and sexual values. He involved himself in the emerging queer subcultures of the early twentieth century. He experienced and enjoyed emotional and sexual intimacy with other men.” Wise does not, however...

Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur “Homosexualität.” by W. Daniel Wilson (review)

W Daniel Wilson, Manner Knaben: Ansichten zur Homosexualitat. Trans. Angela Steidele. Berlin: Insel, 2012. 503 pp.,4l ills.W. Daniel Wilson's engaging, thorough, and original analysis of the role of male-male and sexual desire in Goethe's writings makes significant advances in our understanding of Greek in the age of Goethe, as well as of Goethe's contributions the representation of same-sex desire in the West. Published in German, the text reads smoothly and elegantly despite its highly scholarly and even technical nature-no doubt in part thanks Angela Steidele's translation. While most of Wilson's conclusions about Goethe's writings are convincing, framing of and approach Goethe's texts and the study of sexuality provide an opportunity for stimulating discussions about the international study of sexuality and textuality.Wilson's study begins with stunning interpretation of Goethe's poem Ganymed (1774). The poem, concluding with its beautiful harmonization of active and passive in the phrase umfangend umfangen, sets about do nothing less than provide a radical reinterpretation of Greek love, by unsettling the dynamics between the classical Greek erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved (60; all translations are my own). The beloved Greek shepherd, long por- trayed as the passive object of the attentions of the lover Zeus, finds in Goethe's poem,for the first time in 2,500 years of literary history, (69)ForWilson,Ganymed stands in opposition Der Erlkonig (1782), in that the former tells the story of sexually mature youth who desires the attentions of the lover, while the latter represents the feelings of boy who is the unwilling object of an older man's advances. Wilson argues that Mignon, from the Wilhelm Meister novels, is similar the boy in the Erlkonig-that is, the victim of sexual violence. He concludes with the tantalizing suggestion that might in fact have been castrated, which would certainly shed revelatory light on the following line in the poem Mignon (aka Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?): Was hat man dir, du armes Kind,getan? (2:4).In chapter on Goethe's experiences in Italy, where-as reported in 1787 in letter written Duke Carl August-he came upon many instances of the love of men amongst themselves, Wilson demonstrates virtuosic hermeneutic gifts, with an especially compelling and comprehensive interpretation of the Venetian Epigrams. Composed in response trip in 1790 Venice, published in highly edited form in 1796, and mutilated by censors in the archives, the Epigrams present notoriously difficult interpretive challenge. Wilson argues convincingly that originally planned homoerotic subcycle (117) within the Epigrams, focusing on, in Goethe's own phrase, the four boys from antiquity, Hylas, Hyacinth, Giton, and Antinous, the beloveds of Hercules, Apollo, Encolpius (of the Satyricon), and Emperor Hadrian, respectively. Once again, Goethe continues lifelong project of giving voice the allegedly passive partner, the maturing youth, who remains mute in the ancient sources (124).The public humiliation of Johannes Muller, the Swiss historian who fell victim student in Vienna claiming represent Hungarian suitor, encouraged to give up discretion, take stand, and raise (135). Immediately after the scandal, offered Muller employment at the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, emphasizing his support for man whose same-sex tendencies had been exploited (136). Wilson argues that Miiller's travails inspired publish homage Winckelmann (1805), which openly and positively portrays the art historian's male-male as masculine and laudable. The Winckelmann essay appeared in opposition an increasingly socially conservative and homophobic cultural turn, as late Romanticism became nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. …

Images of Eternal Beauty in Funerary Verse Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Periods by Andrzej Wypustek (review)

Reviewed by: Images of Eternal Beauty in Funerary Verse Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Periods by Andrzej Wypustek Lucia Floridi Andrzej Wypustek . Images of Eternal Beauty in Funerary Verse Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Periods. Mnemosyne Supplements, 352. Leiden and Boston : Brill , 2013 . Pp. xii, 246 . $133.00 . ISBN 978–90–04–23318–8 . The book surveys Greek funerary verse inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods that express positive concepts of the afterlife in order to establish whether they reflect eschatological beliefs about the posthumous destiny of the deceased. While scholars have so far mostly concentrated on the possible associations of this category of epitaphs with mystery cults and other organized sets of beliefs, Wypustek reasonably argues that most of these epitaphs do not reflect specific doctrines. Descriptions of the deceased as either ascending to the stars or kidnapped by a god are basically poetic metaphors that may or may not reflect eschatological beliefs. The title thus somewhat summarizes the author’s main conclusion (ch. 7), namely that the aim of such descriptions was to “beautify” and thus “eternalize” the dead as a means of consolation for the survivors based on “the human conviction that what was beautiful, dear and loved could not cease to exist and could not fall into oblivion” (199). Chapter 1 discusses previous scholarly approaches to the topic and elaborates the useful interpretive category of “consciously formulaic” epigrams; that is, poems that use topoi and conventional language, while still reflecting the true beliefs of the people who selected them, and are thus reliable witnesses to their visions of the afterlife. Chapter 2 explores possible cases of direct apotheosis of the dead, and indirect forms, such as ascension to the ether and catasterism. Chapter 3 is devoted to heroization: Wypustek argues that it was mostly reserved for those who died young and was a means of both securing the protective powers of the dead for the living and of preventing “the deceased child’s misfortunes in the afterlife” (94). Chapter 4 deals with premature death described as marriage with the gods. It analyzes the motif of the “bride of Hades,” where the deceased girl is portrayed as a new Persephone. Wypustek surveys the main interpretations of the topos (in particular, associations with Orphic themes and Eleusinian mysteries have often been detected by scholars). His reasonable conclusion is that, although it might have been used in association with specific doctrines, it mostly served the purpose of stressing the beauty of the deceased. Adonis is then suggested as a possible male equivalent for Persephone in the role of abduction victim: the hypothesis is fascinating, but is not supported by convincing evidence. It is almost exclusively based on a literary poem, [End Page 557] Ausonius epigram 53 Green, where the myth of Adonis serves the purpose of stressing, through the association with that of Ganymede, the androgynous appearance of the deceased, as a way to make “acceptable” the pederastic theme to a fourth-century A.D. audience, as I have recently argued in Eikasmós 23 (2012) 283–300. It is thus more likely to be Ausonius’ innovation than the only remnant of a no longer extant funerary tradition where the male deceased was identified with Adonis abducted by Persephone. Chapter 5 analyzes epitaphs where the dead are represented as abducted by the gods to become their lovers. Particular attention is paid to the myth of Ganymede. Wypustek dismisses Eustathius’ explicit interpretation of Ganymedes’ abduction as a symbol of premature death, arguing for a late source (in Il. 1205.10, 4.396.5 van der Valk), and he does not mention Plato, Phaedrus 255c, whose reading of the story already prefigured the symbolic idealization that was to become common. Nevertheless, he admits that Ganymede’s abduction was an allegory of premature death, and unconvincingly reaches this conclusion through the association of the topos with the theme of deaths caused by the thunder of Zeus. For Ganymede as a symbol of the ascension to heaven in literature and art in general, a reference to J. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London 2007) 169–200 would...

Nature Vs Naturalist: Paths Diverging and Converging in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son

I examine the impulses that drove Edmund Gosse to follow the formal biography of his father with Father and Son. Before looking for ‘gay sensibility’ in the text, I consider how scientific discourse in the late 19th century opened an understanding of homosexuality to Gosse, and consider how Father and Son preceded societal acceptance of Freudian analysis. Gosse's father was a naturalist, and I consider how Gosse eroticised childhood memory as ‘natural’ and ‘intuitive’. I chart his attraction to a sub-culture of literature that expresses ‘manly love’, and track his expansion from the boyhood appreciation of Hero and Leander, which expelled him from the family home, to his devotional approaches to Whitman, the poet replacing the father as an eroticised father figure. Symonds presented himself as another older man, with explicit teachings about ‘Greek love’. Gosse then became the older figure to Andre Gide, ultimately disturbed by the younger man's sexual explicitness. Ending this substitute father theme, I document how Gosse's ‘true love’ the sculptor Thornycroft removed himself to a ‘father figure’ role. The writing of Father and Son delivered the child Edmund as the innocent companion the adult Edmund needed, and freed him from a disappointed paternal narrative.

Childhood and Greek Love: Dorian Gray and Peter Pan

This essay argues that both Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan offer studies of eternal male children and their consciousness because studies of congenital inversion and childhood were linked in the late Victorian period. Representing the coalescence of three late Victorian fields—developmental psychology (then called Child Study), sexology, and Greek studies—Wilde's Dorian and Barrie's Peter Pan embody perceptions of queerness, hedonism, and arrested development theorized as congenital inversion yet paradoxically understood as the free-floating desire of youth before a "proper" love object is chosen.

Byron and Oriental Love

This essay argues that Byron’s Lara (1814) invokes Orientalist discourses so as to suggest the queer potential of its love plot. I contend that “Oriental love,” with its expansive connotations, represents a more apposite name for Byron’s pluralist sexual drives than the “Greek love” that has often been attributed to him. The essay supports these claims by examining a recurring type in Orientalist ethnography: the page boys who served eminent men in the Ottoman Empire, sometimes sexually. Allusions to the figure of the page boy in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century texts show that Muslim same-sex practices were widely known, if not lengthily discussed. After tracking the circulation of this Orientalist trope, I look at its reworking in the form of Lara’s boyish servant, Kaled. I maintain that, by juxtaposing the nonexclusionary nature of Ottoman eros with the open question of Kaled’s sex, the poem undermines the hermeneutic urge to decide, according to the emerging hetero/homo binary, the sexual identity of the characters or the poem’s author. At the same time, I show how Lara stages and ironizes upon the textual and social processes of heterosexualization that have made this queer suggestibility pass unnoticed for a general readership.

“Höhere Begattung,” “höhere Schönheit”: Goethe’s Homoerotic Poem “Selige Sehnsucht”

The main in writing on Goethe and is that many readers will expect his own sexuality to be at the center, particularly since previous books have set the tone. This is particularly true of nonscholarly attempts, but scholars are not immune to the fascination with making Goethe gay.1 It is time, I think, for us to question our methods and assumptions, which necessarily involves taking into account the historical distance between us and same-sex love in the eighteenth century.2 The effect of ahistorical interpretations is not only that few scholars pay attention to them. For they ultimately detract from the literary texts and what they have to say to us. There has been little attempt to get to the bottom of what should be burning issues, given our own age's conflicts over homosexuality and Goethe's central role in German identity: What were Goethe's views on same-sex how did he deal with power relations, the problem of the (Foucault), the closet, and other thorny issues? And an analysis of these works and his thoughts quickly leads into an area that is essentially ignored in almost all these treatments: Goethe grappled with the ancient and Roman models of same-sex in which the desire is one-way, desire of an ernstes for a (usually younger) eromenos, of a lover for a beloved. I have attempted to show elsewhere that in his works beginning with the poem Ganymed (1772?) and the play Gotter Helden undWleland (1773), right through to the penultimate scene of Faust II (completed in 1831), Goethe was intent on unsettling this unidirectional model of Greek love, giving a voice and subjectivity to the younger partner, making the beloved into a lover, paying attention to his feelings and desires. Despite his inspiration from dissident ancient texts that gave impetus to an alternative, egalitarian model (for Goethe's early period, they are Pindar and Theocritus), this is a revolutionary moment in the European portrayal of samesex male which had clung quite tenaciously to the usual ancient pattern. Goethe's reversal presages in important ways the modern relationships between equals that dominates male-male desire.3I am not suggesting that we cannot be bold in our interpretations-only that they be grounded in clear evidence, historical contextualization, and immersion in Goethe's sources. But within those limitations, we find that Goethe's approach to same-sex love is bound up in a web of subtle allusions, primarily to and Roman texts, but also to his own works. One of his major treatments of same-sex love is the Schenkenbuch of the Westoestlicher Divan, published in 1819. The love of the older poet for a young cupbearer-his age is indeterminate, but patterns of puberty and terminology would suggest that he may be as old as eighteen or nineteen4-is so obvious that commentaries gingerly point out homoerotic''motifs in the poems, but steering clear of words like homosexual. In this, they follow Goethe, who suggested in the prose part of the Divan that the Schenkenbuch treats the love for a boy unseren Sitten gemas in aller Reinheit (FA I, 3.1:224). Nevertheless, even in the prose section, the changes Goethe made to the anecdotes from Saadi (Sa'di) smuggle sexuality into the depiction of pederasty in the Schenkenbuch. In the poems themselves, a plethora of imagery relating to and Roman antiquity, but most particularly to Goethe's medieval Persian sources, clearly suggest sexuality.5The primary impact that gave rise to Goethe's project was the Austrian diplomat and scholar Joseph von Hammer's two-volume German translation of the poems of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz, which happens to be one of the most openly homoerotic of any available translations from the Persian in Goethe's day (other translations of Persian poetry generally bowdlerized the texts without comment).6 For it remains one of the big secrets of Divan scholarship that das beherrschende Motiv in medieval Persian literature is love for boys-it does not treat love of women at all. …

Hellenic transgressions, homosexual politics: Wilde, Symonds and Sicily

This essay explores a lesser known aspect of the construction of Italy in late Victorian culture: the way in which Sicily, with its ancient Greek associations, functioned as a code for the expression of dissident desire and provided a powerful ideological support in the emergence of modern male homosexual identity in Britain. Symonds and Wilde, who both visited Sicily twice, are intellectual travellers whose motivations are not limited to those of the Victorian crowds flocking to Italy in the wake of the ‘Mediterranean passion’: they are actively engaged, at home, in the unfolding of a homosexual counterdiscourse. In this cultural context, which includes the poetry of the ‘Uranians’ and Wilhelm von Gloeden's photographs of nude Sicilian boys posing as ancient Greeks, Sicily is represented through the codes of aesthetic Hellenism as a homoerotic pastoral and sensual utopia. Homosexual literati projected their sexual fantasies on the Sicilian ‘other’ and looked for the reincarnation of the Hellenic ideal in the bodies of contemporary youths. Sicily is a space for Hellenic transgressions in more than one sense: as a travel destination for the actualisation of illicit desires, and as a strategic cultural space from which to invoke the legitimisation of the ancient ‘Greek love’ tradition.

Mythos, Fiktion, Geschichte: Ein Beitrag zum 'Realismus' der antiken Romane

In this paper I argue that the description of literary narrative in ancient rhetoric could have provided Greek and Roman novelists with a critical vocabulary, and that this vocabulary is reflected in their works. The major category by or against which novelists define their writing turns out to be μῦθος / fabula , which implies the idea of an unreal and unlikely narrative. I analyze the most significant passages and conclude that the first novels, which were posing as history, avoided looking unreal and unlikely, while later novelists were free to play with the concept of μῦθος / fabula on an individual basis. Given that exactly the Roman novels (and Achilles Tatius) are most defined by μῦθος / fabula , my result also questions our modern critical vocabulary according to which these novels are often called ‘realistic’. Stefan Tilg holds an Ambizione scholarship of the Swiss National Science Foundation and is hosted by the Klassisch-Philologisches Seminar of the University of Zurich. He is the author of Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel (Oxford 2010) and is currently writing a monograph on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses .

‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and the politics of Greek love

The paper examines Edward Carpenter’s 1899 essay on education that defended the value of powerful same-sex attachments, either between older and younger boys or between teachers and pupils, in the context of Victorian ideologies of same-sex affection. Linda Dowling has described how ‘a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms’ was fashioned out of the discourse of Greek studies in 19th-century Oxford by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Uranian poets. We argue that Carpenter’s position in both ‘Affection in Education’ and his pamphlet on Homogenic love is best interpreted not in terms of this particular counterdiscourse so much as in light of John Addington Symonds’ sharp political reaction against it, a reaction that was grounded in recent historical scholarship on the ancient Greeks and which rejected the idealisation of intellectualised, aristocratic boy-love in favour of a vision of egalitarian sexual relationships between men, and which was, in Carpenter’s own case, very closely associated with his own ideals of social and political progress.

Detratores do homoerotismo grego: uma historiografia essencialista

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o cunho essencialista da abordagem de algumas obras historiográficas anteriores ao evento de Stonewall (1969) que, ao se debruçarem sobre o estudodo amor, da educação e da mitologia gregas, necessitaram colocar em pauta a questão, então constrangedora, do homoerotismo grego. Essa historiografia, tentando delinear a face pedagógica desse homoerotismo, devido à sua importância crucial para a cultura grega, escamoteiou ou interpretou mal sua face erótica, resvalando para a incompreensão das fontes gregas que evidenciam a relação, propriamente, erótica do fenômeno da sociedade. O momento da escrita dessas obras historiográficas foi de um extraordinário autoritarismo e de um extremado conservadorismo, época em que fortes interdições pesavam sobre a homossexualidade no mundo ocidental, o que justifica, em parte, a superficialidade daquelas análises.

Askesis as Aesthetic Home: Edward Perry Warren, Lewes House, and the Ideal of Greek Love

ABSTRACTThis article explores the queer writings of Boston-born Edward Perry warren (1860–1928) and the spaces of his Lewes House, East Sussex, that formed the basis of his Uranian ideal. warren, along with his personal secretary (aka lover), John Marshall, amassed an impressive collection of mainly antiquities, most of which helped to form the Boston Museum of Fine Art. At Lewes House warren conceived a community of younger, liked-minded men, many of whom benefited directly from his financial generosity and guidance. For the owner of the house education and intellectual pursuits were the guiding principles behind what was ultimately an ancient-Greek inspired homosocial community. Lewes House was austere and coded as a space for both his much celebrated collection and community, each being an extension of the other. In his three-volume The Defence of Uranian Love (1928), written under the pseudonym of Arthur Lyon Raile, warren falls within a specific literary tradition of queer authors at the end of the nineteenth century who turned back to ancient Greece as a preferred exemplary society in which an older male figure took a younger male under his tutelage and protection, guiding him to his adult life. An important missing component of the Greek ideal that men like warren espoused and wrote about was the space in which this ideal could be performed, worked through, and aestheticized.