The Charmides Conundrum: Exploring Oscar Wilde, Plato and Greek Homoeroticism
By Lindsey Kolhase, Gustavus Adolphus College 2023
I. Introduction
In 1881, Oscar Wilde published his collection Poems, which cataloged, revised, and expanded his previously published poems [1]. Included within this work was the longest poem published by Wilde, entitled Charmides. Wilde’s poem is 666 lines long, written in iambic pentameter following the Venus and Adonis stanza [2]. This poem is unique in its story, focusing on a young Greek man, Charmides, who travels to Athens and spends a night in the Parthenon. Here, he undresses and assaults the statue of Athena, who later causes him to drown at sea. His body is cast upon the shore where a dryad, a forest nymph, falls in love with the corpse. The dryad then mourns the physical relationship she cannot have with Charmides, and Artemis slays her for her promiscuity. In the end, Charmides and the dryad are reunited passionately in the underworld. This story is unique to Wilde, though it seems to draw inspiration from Plato’s work of the same name. Plato’s Charmides dialogue focuses on the conversation between Socrates and a handsome young man named Charmides, wherein Socrates admits to feeling attraction to Charmides.
To some [3], the themes of these texts do not overlap beyond their namesakes. However, I argue that Oscar Wilde purposefully references this Platonic dialogue and the reception of Hellenic ideas of masculinity and sexuality. Although the influence of Classical culture on Victorian sexual identity has been previously explored [4], few scholars have made the effort to closely examine individual works, their inspiration, and Victorian conceptions of Greek love. This essay examines the influence of Plato’s dialogue Charmides on the poetry of Oscar Wilde, and addresses Wilde’s repurposing of ancient homoeroticism through his erotic poetic works to fantasize about the Greek past from the perspective of his Victorian present.
II. Greek Pederasty and Victorian Academia
Wilde was a proponent of a new breed of Hellenism in literary tradition [5] Within the elite sphere of academia, scholars could shape and give direction to literary-aesthetic tendencies that were (and still are) lumped together under the catch-all rubric of ‘Hellenism’. This new Hellenism synthesized, according to Richard Ellman, “the best of Greek culture and Christian culture" [6]. This Victorian aesthetic allowed for the exploration and celebration of Greek love and the politics of sexuality. The Victorians viewed homosexuality with horror, and Britain stood out at the turn of the 20th century as the only country in Western Europe which criminalized all male homosexual acts with draconian penalties. In the latter half of the 19th century, with the dramatic increase of legal and medical texts attempting to define homosexuality, certain intellectuals looked back towards the ancient world for more positive models of homosexual desire. Ultimately, this romanticization of Greek masculinity provided justification for actions which at the time were deemed to be sinful. Oscar Wilde celebrated the subversive homoeroticism that was encoded in ancient Greek imagery and linguistics [7]. In this context, Hellenism provided both positive models of homosexual desire as well as a coded space to engage in a queer lifestyle.
Ancient Greek society did not distinguish sexual desire or behavior by the gender of the participants, but rather by the role that each participant played in the sex act, that of active penetrator or passive penetrated [8]. In ancient Greece, pederasty (παιδεραστία) [9] was a socially acknowledged intergenerational relationship between an older male (the ἐραστής) and a pubescent or adolescent male (the ἐρώμενος) [10]. Institutionalized pederasty in Greece had its origins in Crete in the post-Homeric phase of the Archaic age in the seventh-century BCE [11]. This practice was deeply ingrained in social customs, and was an institutionalized aspect of the elite male’s life. An older partner would court the younger partner, who would become a combination of protégé and sexual object [12]. The ἐραστής was to educate, protect, and love his ἐρώμενος, who in turn would provide his beauty and youth to his partner.
Ancient Greeks regarded the adolescent male citizens as independent actors able to make rational decisions about sex while maintaining their dignity and behaving with honor in a homoerotic relationship. In the pederastic tradition, active-passive polarization corresponded with dominant and submissive social roles. The active and penetrative role was associated with masculinity, higher social status, and adulthood; the passive and submissive role was associated with femininity, lower social status, and youth.
The considerable regard for male-male relations and its cultural practice in ancient Greece could not be in greater contrast with the institutionalized homophobia in Victorian Britain [13] Victorian authors [14], in an era that granted great intellectual prestige and cultural capital to the Classics, embraced pederasty and “Greek love,” as an ideal of “spiritual procreancy” superior to heterosexuality [15]. The Greeks offered evidence of the health and social value of male same-sex desire; ancient Greece held a unique place among other cultures in that homosexual relationships were valorized and allowed to flourish. The authority of Oxford Hellenism in Victorian culture provided many authors in the 19th century with a positive discourse within which to discuss erotic male relationships [16]. For the elites in Victorian England, ancient Greece provided both a historical locus and an idealized topos for the voicing of dissentient desires and sexualities.
III. Oscar Wilde and Hellenism
Combining these new literary movements with his academic origins in Classics [17], Oscar Wilde was determined to create an aesthetic tradition of the homosexual ideal within the fashionable framework of ‘Hellenism.’ Wilde’s poetic body is largely a record of his disillusionment with modern society and his romanticization of the past and its mythology. In his poem Charmides, Wilde writes:
Too venturous poesy O why essay To pipe again of passion! fold thy wings O’er daring Icarus and bid thy lay Sleep hidden in the lyre’s silent strings, Till thou hast found the old Castalian rill, Or from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho’s golden quill! Enough, enough that he whose life had been A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame, Could in the loveless land of Hades glean One scorching harvest from those fields of flame Where passion walks with naked unshod feet And is not wounded,—ah! enough that once their lips could meet [18].Here, Wilde disguises himself and his desires by creating a counter-discourse on Victorian sexuality, originating within Greek culture. The references to “sin”, “shame”, and “passion”— all terms Victorian puritanism had used in the context of homosexual relations— are applied to a heterosexual, mythologized relationship. In Wilde’s surviving writings the first reference to homosexuality cannot be traced earlier than 1876, and it was probably not for another ten years that, in his behavior and outlook, he opted decisively for his homosexual longings over the heteroromantic attraction of his bisexuality [19]. It’s clear to some extent that Oscar Wilde achieved a level of personal expression through the publication of his erotically-charged works. By being a proponent of new ideas of Hellenism within the modern world, Wilde was attempting to mitigate the harsh puritan beliefs of Victorian society.
Wilde’s Hellenism was a double-edged sword— an advantage in his youth, but an impediment in his adult life. The Greeks gave Wilde permission to pursue a more sexually-promiscuous path in his life and in his work, and this fascination with Greek love served him well until he was faced with the societal reprecussions of his actions. In 1895, Oscar Wilde became the iconic victim of Victorian Puritanism and English homosexuality laws. The circumstances surrounding Wilde’s charges of gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts became one of the first celebrity trials followed heavily by the news media in London. Wilde received a two-year prison sentence with hard labor [20]. 6
IV. Plato's and Wilde's Charmides
Wilde often focused on taboo topics in his published works. From opium to sex, there are examples of hedonism in all of his writings. However, Wilde’s works inspired by Hellenism seemingly earned him the most backlash. Along with engagement with the culture and mythos of the ancients, Oscar Wilde also found himself dabbling with the perspectives of great philosophical ideas, such as the Aristotelian and the Platonic. Wilde had a strong conviction that Aristotle offered a theory of art from a purely aesthetic perspective, whereas Plato wrote about the ethical ramifications of art and aesthetics. On Wilde’s engagement with Plato, scholar Joseph O’Leary writes:
His ‘deep and long-lasting engagement with Plato’ is shown by the annotations to Jowett’s The Dialogues of Plato. The most frankly homoerotic of the dialogues, the Charmides, had a special charm for him. He told an American reporter in 1882 that his Keatsian erotic poem ‘Charmides’ (1878-79), in 109 six-line stanzas, was his ‘most finished and perfect’ poem. It lost him some friends [21]. In the view of the young Wilde, Charmides was his poetic magnum opus. It was his longest poetic work, preserved in full. However, it appears to have burned some bridges within Wilde’s social sphere. What about this work was so polarizing that caused Wilde’s friends to cut ties with him? Perhaps it was the graphic assault of a virginal feminine deity that drove his peers to question Wilde’s morals or the erotic post-mortem relationship between Charmides and an unloyal dryad. However, I believe these social repercussions were because of the homoerotic themes that Wilde lifted from the dialogues of Plato.
Wilde’s poem Charmides draws its inspiration from the Platonic dialogue of the same name. While on the surface there are no direct parallels between these works, Wilde's text depends on, for proper appreciation, a deep knowledge of the Platonic text. As Wilde would say, “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of arts and culture" [22].
The Charmides was one of the earliest and least -known works of Plato in antiquity [23], making Wilde's engagement with it an act of edification and further sublimation of homoeroticism. Largely, this dialogue discusses the concept of σωφροσύνη, an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in a well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, providence, morality, and restraint [24]. Σωφροσύνη is therefore the product of intense passion under perfect control. After all, παιδεία, the "sum of physical and intellectual achievement to which the human body and mind can aspire," was both implicitly and explicitly linked to the love inspired between pupil and teacher by the mutual enjoyment of philosophy and physical beauty. This work employs the identity of σωφροσύνη, showing the physical and intellectual manifestation of the Platonic ἔρως.
This dialogue is notable because it is the only text within the Platonic corpus in which Socrates admits to feeling sexual desire for a young man. The legacy of Greek pederasty was mediated largely by Plato, who sublimated the physical aspect of the erotic tradition of pederasty to its moral and pedagogical aspect [25]. Pederasty, as an educational institution, was recommended by Plato as the ideal form of life, provided that it is divested as much as possible of its sexual physicality.
The dialogue dramatizes a conversation taking place at the palaestra, a public area in ancient Greece dedicated to teaching and practicing wrestling and other sports. This setting immediately evokes images of masculinity, sexuality, and suppleness because of its association with masculine bodies and peak physical performance. Plato focuses on the discussion between Socrates, a very handsome and respected young man named Charmides, and Charmides’ kinsman Critias. It is the year 432 BCE and Socrates, the narrator of this tale, has just returned from his military service in Potidea. Socrates visits the wrestling school of Taureas, where he is greeted by many of his friends from his youth. Socrates then proceeds to ask his peers if any young men are particularly distinguished for their beauty, their wisdom, or both. He is told of Charmides, whom he remembers as a child, but who has grown into an increasingly handsome young man. When Charmides enters for the first time in Plato’s dialogue, those around Charmides become struck with his beauty. Plato writes of all the men and boys near Charmides being unable to tear their gazes away from his physical beauty, focusing on his physical beauty and the erotically charged gaze of the male onlookers. All of those present in this scene gaze hungrily at Charmides, being described as follows:
… ἀλλὰ πάντες ὥσπερ ἄγαλμα ἐθεῶντο αὐτόν. … but that they were all staring at him as if he was a statue [26].
The reference to Charmides as an ἄγαλμα specifically is an interesting thematic choice that cannot be overlooked. Not only does Socrates refer to Charmides as a mere passive body, an aesthetic monument unto which anything can be done, but he compares him to the images of deities preserved in votive offerings and cult images. This interaction defines the human interaction between Charmides and Socrates as the erotic model of lover and beloved. This assumes a strict division of social roles, active and passive.
We see this social division reflected within Wilde’s original story of Charmides. Charmides, a Greek boy overcome with his erotic desires, assaults the statue of Athena during the nighttime. The statue, an ἄγαλμα praising the chastity and virtue of Athena, is corrupted by the seductive touch of Charmides:
Never I ween did lover hold such tryst, For all night long he murmured honeyed word, And saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed Her pale and argent body undisturbed, And paddled with the polished throat, and pressed His hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast [27]. The goddess in this poem is a passive entity during the assault, only taking vengeance on Charmides later for his criminal acts within her temple. Charmides is inspired by the beautiful, stagnant body and face of the goddess, taking advantage of someone who cannot consent or reciprocate his touch. She is his beloved, and he is the unrestrained lover. Wilde writes:
For whom would not such love make desperate? And nigher came, and touched her throat, and with hands violate Undid the cuirass, and the crocus gown, And bared the breasts of polished ivory, Till from the waist the peplos falling down Left visible the secret mystery Which to no lover will Athena show, The grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of snow [28]. In the ancient Greek world, ἔρως, the obsessive sexual desire for one person, was a response to the stimulus of visual beauty [29]. This response may have been intensified by admirable qualities in the desired person, but it is not first evoked by these feelings. It is purely lustful in nature. In Wilde’s work, the homoerotic content is hidden, as the storyline is largely heterosexual on the surface level.
Wilde’s work portrays heterosexuality as lustful and unrestrained, while the homoerotic content remains primly in place. This is likely a choice Wilde made because it was easier to engage with classical themes when utilizing a relationship that was socially acceptable in his Victorian present. Wilde is subtly satirizing and critiquing the "acceptable" mode of dominant heterosexuality by exposing it to be more truly deviant than the unmentioned homoeroticism. The content of this poem is scandalous enough as it stands—throwing a homoerotic relationship that echoes the namesake of Charmides into such a dividing story would not be appreciated in the heterosexually-dominated sociopolitical world.
After assaulting the shrine of Athena, Charmides flees to the coast and takes a ship. After nine days out at sea, his ship first encounters a great owl. The gigantic figure of Athena herself then walks across the surface of the sea towards him. Charmides cries out for Athena and leaps into the waves hoping to reach the goddess and touch her once more. He drowns, unable to restrain his desire for the body of the goddess.
Charmides’ body is later drawn back to Greece by the grace of “some good Triton-god”, and he is washed up on the shore. Discovered by a band of dryads, one dryad becomes enamored with Charmides’ beauty. She believes him to be a deity of the sea and dreams of what their life could be like under the sea, renouncing the love of a boy who was courting her in the process. She urges Charmides to awake and take her virginity, but she is discovered by her mistress Artemis and shot with an arrow:
Sobbing her life out with a bitter cry On the boy’s body fell the Dryad maid, Sobbing for incomplete virginity, And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead, And all the pain of things unsatisfied, And the bright drops of crimson youth crept down her throbbing side. Ah! pitiful it was to hear her moan, And very pitiful to see her die Ere she had yielded up her sweets, or known The joy of passion, that dread mystery Which not to know is not to live at all, And yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall [30]. In this sequence of events, we see the character roles inverted. Charmides, dead on the shore, becomes this same godly, passive body. His body is worshiped by the dryad, who is begging for him to awaken and ravish her. At this moment, Charmides himself becomes the same metaphorical ἄγαλμα. Wilde also mentions Charmides as a symbol of the sort of beautiful Greek youth immortalized as statues in his 1891 short story ‘Portrait of Mr W. H.’, focusing on a dead Charmides once more: “His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet’s verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So it had been with others whose beauty had given creative impulse to their age… Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy" [31]. Even beyond the original poem, Wilde displays his Charmides as a model of Greek beauty and youth.
The immortalization of beauty is both passive, in that it is looked at and can't respond or defend itself; but it's also active in the sense that it inspires creativity in viewers. In Plato’s dialogue, the passivity of homoeroticism also goes both ways. Socrates finds himself frozen in the presence of Charmides, essentially describing himself as a deer in headlights. Socrates says:
τότε δή, ὦ γεννάδα, εἶδόν τε τὰ ἐντὸς τοῦ ἱματίου καὶ ἐφλεγόμην καὶ οὐκέτ᾽ ἐν ἐμαυτοῦ ἦν καὶ ἐνόμισα σοφώτατον εἶναι τὸν Κυδίαν τὰ ἐρωτικά, ὃς εἶπεν ἐπὶ καλοῦ λέγων παιδός, ἄλλῳ ὑποτιθέμενος, εὐλαβεῖσθαι μὴ κατέναντα λέοντος νεβρὸν ἐλθόντα μοῖραν αἱρεῖσθαι κρεῶν: αὐτὸς γάρ μοι ἐδόκουν ὑπὸ τοῦ τοιο ύτου θρέμματος ἑαλωκέναι. Then, noble one, I saw the inside of his clothes and I became enflamed, and I could not control myself any longer; and I thought no one to be as wise as Cydias [32], who in speaking of a beautiful boy recommends someone to, 'be cautious as to not become a fawn before the lion, and to be seized as a part of his flesh'; for I too felt that I had become the prey of such a creature [33]. Socrates here, while aroused by the physical beauty of Charmides, seeks to control the wild beast which is his own passion. Plato is calling attention to the ἔρως of Socrates and directs his sexuality towards the intellect of Charmides rather than his physical beauty. Socrates, embodying philosophical inner virtue, represents genuine σωφροσύνη. Unlike Wilde’s character of Charmides, Socrates is able to restrain himself in the face of sexual arousal. He is depicted as a paragon of self-control in the face of erotic temptation. This is a manifestation of the virtuous σωφροσύνη, a self-restraint that is not embodied within Oscar Wilde’s character of Charmides, or Wilde himself.
V. Wilde's Greek Passion
Greek love pervaded Wilde’s personal life and actions as much as it did his writing. Like Wilde’s Charmides, Wilde found himself unable and unwilling to control his erotic urges despite the outward disapproval from the rest of the world. Wilde took many young lovers in his life, following what he believed to be the ideal relationships inspired by the ancient Greeks. His famous simile in De Profundis to describe his relationship with rent boys [34] as such: “It was like feasting with panthers" [35], implying a lascivious sex life. The known ages of Oscar's lovers ranged from fifteen (as seen with Herbert Tankard and Giuseppe Loverdi [36]) to twenty-one (the age of Bosie Douglas, who later brought the legal charges against Wilde, when their affair was briefly sexual). The best-known biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann argues convincingly that seventeen was his favorite age [37].
These recorded relationships raise the important question: Were they relationships between equals, and so socially correct in today’s terms, or were they age-structured affairs to which the older and younger lover contributed different but complementary things? Were these sexual affairs one-sided, with one partner being a passive, unconsenting body like in both Wilde’s and Plato’s differing Charmides? Here we need go no further than Oscar’s applause-rousing explanation to the jury of “the love that dare not speak its name,” delineating precisely the disparate contributions to mutual affection contributed by an elder and younger man [38]. Wilde’s testimony to the jury at his case in 1895 reads as follows:
Love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamor of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it [39]. Wilde’s description of the love between two men as a “deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect,” indeed pretends to advocate for sexual innocence. Writing to Robbie Ross [40] in February 1898, Wilde enunciates his oft-quoted defense of his homosexuality: “A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian [41] love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble–more noble than other forms" [42]. In his defense speech, Wilde plays the role of Plato and claims the more intellectual version of pederasty because of the onlooking jury; while in his personal prison letters, Wilde does not hide his homosexuality, instead saying that he refuses to be ashamed of it. Wilde’s Charmides is a subtle critique of the idea that heterosexuality has any claim to the moral high ground.
VI. CONCLUSION
In much of his poetic work, Wilde repurposes ancient homoeroticism to fantasize about the Greek past from the perspective of his Victorian present. Victorian society was prudish and repressed, and liberation of sex could be found in the halls of the Greeks. In Western society, homosexuality has long been seen as a mental disease in itself, or the reflection of a mental disorder. The clinical picture of homosexuality that arose in the late 19th century emphasized the inadequacy of queer individuals and their behaviors. However, homosexuality in past eras, particularly the Hellenistic period, was an undeniable reality that Victorian intellectuals struggled to censor.
This is most obvious in the themes of Wilde’s “Charmides,” which was a largely polarizing work in the period it was published. The erotic nature of the poem combined with Oscar Wilde’s affinity for challenging social norms left his peers aghast—especially after Wilde was sentenced to prison for his homosexuality. For Wilde, the face and the body of the beautiful young man inspire him; these are what he romanticizes.
In the poem, there is clearly a thematic link between this work and the homoerotic Platonic dialogue from which it draws inspiration. Wilde makes reference to an erotically-charged Platonic dialogue to critique the dominant heterosexual identity, which is largely more deviant and lustful than the unmentioned homosexuality. John Allen Quintus writes that:
Wilde is neither a metaphysician nor a philosopher, even if he does touch on issues which belong to their fields … That is why Wilde, as a creative artist and critic, balks at a codified aesthetic and prefers instead to rely on mood, on the emotive import of a work of art [44]. Wilde immortalizes the beauty of Greek form and culture. If the Greek past serves as the pinnacle of cultural perfection, as it was deemed to in 19th-century academia, then the emulation of Greek tradition serves as the most immediate and effective way to embody the Greek past [45].
Throughout this paper, I have analyzed the works of Oscar Wilde and Plato, understanding the social and cultural contexts from which these works were created. In doing so, I believe that I have shown that Oscar Wilde uses Victorian ideas of “Greek Love” to freely express his own sexuality and appreciation for Hellenic conventions of homosexual relationships, while critiquing the morality of the dominant heterosexuality. Wilde’s Charmides is ultimately a subtle criticism of the idea that heterosexuality has any claim to the moral high ground, parodying a restrained homoerotic interaction with uncontrollable hererosexual lust. While the ideas cultivated within the Christian-dominated academic institutions of the 19th century were distorted accounts of historical identities, these beliefs allowed for the exploration of identity that would otherwise be barred from academic and artistic discussion.
As Wilde says himself in his 1891 essay, The Critic as Artist: “Whatever in fact is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medievalism" [46]. The Greeks offered a view of male same-sex desire for Victorian writers that was respected in an era where it was illegal to outwardly possess those desires; ancient Greece allowed these relationships to flourish and ultimately define large portions of their history— something that later western society feared.
NOTES
1 Nick Frankel writes, “By the time Poems was issued by David Bogue in 1881, Wilde already had some forty or so publications to his name … In the eyes of many of its earliest readers, then, Wilde’s Poems must have seemed simply the culminating event in an already lengthy and auspicious poetic career.”
2 This type of stanza is characterized by the rhyming ABABCC, consisting of an iambic pentameter quatrain and couplet. This type of stanza was popularized by William Shakespeare in his 1593 Venus and Adonis poem. See Frankel (1997).
3 Timothy Duff argues, “there are no verbal similarities, no other similarities of plot or theme; the philosophical content of Plato’s Charmides, furthermore, is completely absent .. in both cases, the allusion seems limited only to Charmides’ beauty, youth and sexual desirability.” (173-4).
4 See Ackroyd (2015); Cartledge (1989); Dowling (1994); and Orrells (2011).
Exploring Oscar Wilde, Plato, and Greek Homoeroticism
46 Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” Corpus of Electronic Texts (2021), 119.
Exploring Oscar Wilde, Plato, and Greek Homoeroticism
5 According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to serve a moral, allegorical, or other didactic purpose. This can be conveyed well in the French phrase, "l'art pour l'art" ('art for art's sake'), which is credited to Théophile Gautier. See Quintus (1980).
6 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 329.
7 Daniel Orrells, “Greek Love, Orientalism and Race: Intersections in Classical Reception,” (The Cambridge Classical Journal, 2012), 195.
8 Marilyn B. Skinner. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 13. 9In light of the modern criminalized pedophilia— sexual exploitation of a child’s immaturity and inability to consent either heterosexual or homosexual— it is important to note that pederasty was not perceived by the Greeks to involve prepubescent sexual relations. In ancient Greece we can normally read ‘pederasty’ for ‘homosexuality’, although παιδεραστία was not the equivalent for our modern definition of homosexuality. 10 T. K. Hubbard. “Popular Perceptions of Elite Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” (Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 1998), 53.
11 William Armstrong Percy III, “Reconsiderations About Greek Homosexualities” in Beert C. Verstraete, Vernon Provencal (ed.) Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, Routledge, 1st ed., (2005), 14.
12 Not all pederastic relationships were sexual in nature. It is also uncertain to what extent those in submission would enjoy the sexual favors from their mentor. See Skinner (2014), 18.
13 In England, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, outlawed sexual relations between men (but not between women) was given Royal Assent by Queen Victoria. See Ackroyd (2015), 148.
14 The works of Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, ‘Michael Field’ and E. M. Forster intricately and subversively celebrated homoeroticism coded in ancient Greek imagery and linguistics. See Dowling (1994), 113.
15 Linda C. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Cornell University Press, 1994), 29. 16 Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 115.
17 Wilde received his classical education first at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, then at Trinity College Dublin (1871-4), where he came under the guidance and influence of J.P. Mahaffy, and finally, at Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-8), where he took a Double First in Greats and won the prestigious Newdigate Prize. See Carteledge (1989).
18 Oscar Wilde. Charmides, and Other Poems. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018). 3.649-60 19 Carteldge, “An Onomastic Gloss on the Hellenism of Oscar Wilde,” 11.
Joseph S. O’Leary, “Comic Entrances, Tragic Exits: Wilde and Socrates,” (Journal of Irish Studies, 2019), 79.
20 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 73.
22 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 72.
23 This dating is based on analysis of his writing and the fact that it ends in aporia (A philosophic statement of puzzlement). Some critics like Johann Gottfried Stallbaum traced the dialogue back to the period before the Thirty Tyrants' reign of tyranny over Athens, around 405 BC, while the majority bring it back much later, around 388, after the death of Socrates. See Guthrie (1998).
24 Michael Eisenstadt, “Critias’ Definitions of Σωφροσύνη in Plato’s ‘Charmides’,” (2008), 492. 25 Verstraete and Provencal (ed.), Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, 8.
26 Plato, Cha. 154c8-d1. All following translations of this text are my own.
27 Wilde. Charmides, and Other Poems. 1.127-32.
28 Wilde. Charmides, and Other Poems. 1.106-13.
29 Verstraete and Provencal (ed.), Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, 7.
30 Wilde. Charmides, and Other Poems. 2.535-46
31 Oscar Wilde, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.”, Hesperus Classics, (2003), 25.
32 This could be in reference to the Cydias who was a relatively well-known painter living in 364 BC. However, because this painter was active later in Plato’s life, it is also largely possible to be referring to an unknown Cydias. See Guthrie (1998).
33 Plato, Cha. 155d4-e1.
34 A term for young male sex workers in Britain, still used in the modern day. See Ackroyd (2015). 35 R. Hart-Davis (ed.), “Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde”, New York: Henry Holt, 1st ed., (1979), 758. 36 Hart-Davis (ed.), “Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde”, 355-6.
37 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 459.
38 Ackroyd states of Wilde’s defense, “It remains one of the most impassioned defences of queerness since Plato’s Symposium, and may have helped to save him momentarily from ruin. The jury could not reach a verdict.” (2015),149.
39 “Testimony of Oscar Wilde.” Famous World Trials (2015).
40 Ross was a close friend to Wilde, and a literary executor for him. Ross was also openly homosexual despite risks of being open about his identity. See Ellmann (1988). 43 While there is no explicit reference to queerness in
41 Uranian is a historical term for homosexual men. The word was also used as an adjective in association with male homosexuality or inter-male attraction regardless of sexual orientation. See Ackroyd (2015).
42 R. Hart-Davis (ed.), “Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde”, 1019.
43 Clifton Snider, “Oscar Wilde, Queer Addict: Biography and ‘De Profundis’” The Wildean, (2003), 8.
44 John Allen Quintus, “The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, (1980), 572.
45 Charles Heiko-Stocking, “Greek Ideal as Hyperreal: Greco-Roman Sculpture and the Athletic Male Body,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, (2014), 56.