ONE OF WILDE’S tutors in Greek at Trinity was the Reverend and Doctor John Pentland Mahaffy, a towering intellectual figure and a brilliant and paradoxical conversationalist. Wilde later called him ‘my first and my best teacher . . . the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things’.1
Mahaffy’s stylish and engaging Social Life in Greece, published in 1874, may serve as a symbol of his influence on Wilde. In the acknowledgements, the doctor thanks ‘Mr Oscar Wilde of Magdalen College’ for having ‘made improvements and corrections all through the book’.2
The Greeks, Mahaffy declares in his introduction, are ‘men of like culture with ourselves . . . thoroughly modern, more modern even than the epochs quite proximate to our own’. Their works are living things, in Goethe’s phrase, intended for those who are alive, and not ‘mere treasure-houses of roots and forms to be sought out by comparative grammarians’.3 Mahaffy advises students to eschew the disinterested ‘scientific’ curiosity of the linguist, and urges them instead to engage passionately with the past. They are to use ancient texts to explore the concerns and problems of their own period, bringing contemporary questions, and their own interests, to bear on their reading; they should also allow the alien aspects of Greek literature and culture to challenge their modern assumptions. From this dialogue, both the ancient text and the student would, he hoped, emerge enriched and altered.
One facet of Greek culture that was alien to nineteenth-century civilisation was its approbation of ‘homosexual’ love.4 In Greek society this sometimes took the form of a relationship between an older and a younger man, an institution referred to as paiderastia. Mahaffy argues that the romantic sentiment which animated that union inspired the heroism of countless Greek warriors, as well as several key aspects of the philosophy of Socrates. Paiderastia, he notes, was fully recognised by Greek law and enjoyed an exalted position in the hierarchy of social, cultural and spiritual relations.
‘There is,’ Mahaffy remarks, ‘no field of enquiry, where we are so dogmatic in our social prejudices, and so determined by the special circumstances of our age and country.’5 As we cannot see beyond the limits of our own historical horizon, it is absurd of us to speak of universal ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, and to condemn Greek homosexuality as ‘unnatural’. As to the epithet ‘“unnatural”’, Mahaffy continues with customary panache, ‘the Greeks would answer probably, that all civilisation was unnatural . . . and that many of the best features in all gentle life were best because they were unnatural’. In fact, ‘So different were Greek notions on this point from ours, that they would have thought our sentimental (i.e. heterosexual) relationships . . . unnatural’.6 It was a daring statement at a time when men who engaged in sodomy could be imprisoned for life in England.
Social Life in Greece offers the fullest and frankest discussion of homosexuality in all nineteenth-century classical scholarship. Some commentators have been unable to resist the temptation of attributing it to the disciple, Wilde, rather than to his master. Yet there is neither the evidence nor the need to do so. The tenor of the discussion seems ‘Wildean’ because Mahaffy’s audacious and epigrammatic style profoundly influenced his pupil.
The strategy of engaging the Greeks in a frank dialogue, and exploring the controversial results of that exchange, was also adopted by the renowned Victorian man of letters John Addington Symonds, whose commentaries on the classics deeply fascinated Wilde at this time. The first volume of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets, issued in 1873, was ‘perpetually’ in Wilde’s ‘hands’ at Trinity.7 The second volume came out in 1876, while he was at Oxford. On the title-page, he wrote, ‘Oscar F. O’F. W. Wilde. S.M. Magdalen College, Oxford, May ’76.’8 The date indicates that Wilde purchased the book hot off the printing press.
Studies is an elegantly written survey of most of the surviving corpus of Greek literature. Like Mahaffy, Symonds urges his contemporaries to engage the ancients in a stimulating intellectual conversation. The overwhelming question for Symonds is how modern classicists might set about this, separated as they are from the Greeks by such an interval of time, and by countless cultural differences. He encourages students to visit the landscapes of Greece and southern Italy which are, he says, still imbued with the ancient Greek spirit; he also advises them to focus on the many points at which modern and ancient cultures touch. Studies identifies numerous parallels between the two cultures – Mozart is compared to Aristophanes, and Aeschylus to Whitman and Shakespeare. Wilde borrowed this last comparison during an oral exam at Oxford: questioned by the examiner on Aeschylus, he ‘talked of Shakespeare [and] Walt Whitman’.9 Symonds’s book clearly made a powerful impression on Wilde. In his copy he marked its central arguments; he also transcribed numerous lines from it into his undergraduate notebooks, sometimes verbatim but more often summarising Symonds’s ideas and adapting his language.10*
Wilde’s wholehearted approval of Mahaffy’s and Symonds’s approach to ancient culture is evinced throughout his oeuvre, where he frequently applies Greek ideas to modern issues. Thus the prophecy, contained in his political essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, that machines will one day carry out all unpleasant manual tasks is directly inspired by Aristotle’s Politics.12 Wilde’s approval is also evidenced by his undergraduate reading of another Aristotlean work, the Nicomachean Ethics.
This wide-ranging survey of ethical issues was one of Wilde’s set texts at Oxford. He was also obliged to read Sir Alexander Grant’s annotations and introduction to the work. In contrast to Mahaffy and Symonds, Grant belonged to the Historicist school of criticism, then, as now, prominent in academic circles. Historicists seek to understand literary works exclusively within their historical context and often deny their relevance to the modern world. Grant argues that Aristotle’s Ethics has no purpose beyond offering readers ‘a portrait of a graceful Grecian Gentleman’ of the fourth century BC.13
The annotations in Wilde’s copy of J.E.T. Rodgers’s edition of the Ethics, which is inscribed ‘Oscar Wilde, Magdalen College, October 1877’, illustrate his passionate opposition to this view.14 Inter leaved with the Greek text are around 200 pages on which Wilde has written copious notes in English and Greek. In them he creates a bridge between the past and the present by comparing Aristotle to modern writers such as David Hume and Tennyson;15 he also makes the perceptive observation that ‘one of the reasons why we think the Ethics shallow’ is precisely because it has so ‘saturated modern thought’.16
Wilde uses Aristotle to wrestle with broad, moral and philosophical issues still relevant in his own day. ‘The great questions,’ he muses, are, ‘what is good for man?’ and ‘how it is possible to know the right and do the wrong?’17 He clearly believed that the Greek philosopher still offered readers possible answers to these eternal questions. Both in his marginalia and in the notebook entries he made on the Ethics he addresses Aristotle as a contemporary; at times, it is as though the philosopher is standing beside his desk as he scribbles away – ‘Doing and making. Is this a sound difference?’ Wilde asks the ancient sage at one point.18
In the light of these comments it comes as no surprise to find the remark ‘Grant is quite foolish’ among Wilde’s marginalia.19 Nor did Wilde’s hostility to the scholar mellow with the passing of the years. A decade later he would include Grant’s edition of the Ethics in the list of books he strongly advised people ‘not to read’.20
Although Mahaffy was no historicist, he was keenly interested in archaeology and social history; he also travelled extensively in Greece in order to acquire an intimate knowledge of the land and its peoples. Here again, the Trinity don was exceptional, at a time when the focus of classical scholarship was the philological study of ancient texts. In Wilde’s eyes, the fact that Mahaffy had visited Greece, ‘and saturated himself there with Greek thought and feeling’, elevated him above the other dons.21
Mahaffy’s imaginative use of archaeology and topography to illuminate ancient literature is exemplified in his Rambles and Studies in Greece. He enthusiastically identifies the rock at which ‘Plutarch sat’, and is thrilled at the prospect of filling out ‘the idle descriptions and outlines of many books with the fresh reality itself ’.22 He describes the sites of a number of archaeological excavations he visited, and uses the finds made there to explicate classical texts.
Once again, Wilde assisted his mentor, this time by proofreading Rambles and Studies before its original publication in 1876. In the spring vacation of the following year, when Mahaffy returned to Greece to gather material for an enlarged edition of the book, Wilde accompanied him.
Mahaffy and his young protégé visited Corfu, Olympia, Argos, Mycenae, Arcadia and Athens. Wilde’s account of their odyssey unfortunately survives only in the form of a draft fragment. In it, he extols the beauty of Greece’s low mountainous coast, the gorgeous dress of its people and their rich and sensuous skin colouring.23
The excursion caused Wilde, then in his third year at Magdalen, to miss the beginning of Trinity term. He hoped the college authorities would turn a blind eye to his tardiness, and wrote to them in advance to explain the reasons for it, estimating that he would arrive ten days into the new semester. ‘Seeing Greece,’ he nonchalantly explained to the Dean of Arts, ‘is really a great education for anyone and will I think benefit me greatly, and Mr Mahaffy is such a clever man that it is quite as good as going to lectures to be in his society.’24
This was not simply an excuse. Wilde genuinely believed that the ‘chance of seeing’ the ruins and excavations at Mycenae and Athens would be advantageous to his studies. Magdalen disagreed. When Wilde returned from Greece over three weeks into term, the authorities decided to rusticate him (i.e. send him down for the remainder of the term), implicitly punishing his, and Mahaffy’s, approach to the classics, as well as his late arrival.25 Wilde was infuriated by the severity of the sentence and the philistine attitude it displayed, claiming, years later, that he ‘was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia’.26 Yet he never regretted his decision. The trip animated Greek art and literature for him, infusing it with ‘a living reality’.27
Like his master, Wilde believed that archaeology could be used to elucidate classical texts. After his graduation from Oxford he became a member of the pro-archaeology Hellenic Society, and in 1879 he made an impressive, though ultimately unsuccessful, application for an archaeological studentship at Athens.* Wilde cannot, therefore, be characterised as an out and out anti-historicist – it would be more accurate to describe him as a scholar who recognised the value of the historicist approach but considered it limited in scope and application. The ideal, as ever with Wilde, was to balance two apparently contradictory approaches; classicists should, he thought, produce historically sensitive interpretations that also spoke directly to the present.28
During their 1877 jaunt, Wilde and Mahaffy visited Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae. The celebrated German archaeologist had, earlier in the decade, located the site of Troy, not by scientific methods but through his profound knowledge of ancient literature and by an instinct even more inspired than that of Sir William Wilde. At Mycenae he performed a similarly miraculous act of divination by unearthing countless skeletons and a hoard of regal treasure.
During one dig, which took place about a year before Wilde’s visit, Schliemann found a golden mask with a skull beneath it. Always one for the grand theatrical gesture, the archaeologist exclaimed, in awestruck tones, ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon’, and announced that he had discovered the tomb of the ancient King of Argos. Modern scholarship is extremely sceptical about this, and also about many of Schliemann’s other claims: Agamemnon is now universally regarded as a purely legendary figure. Wilde and Mahaffy would certainly have harboured similar doubts about the assertion, but these did not necessarily diminish the archaeologist’s achievement in their eyes. Soon after the visit Mahaffy would hail the German as a divinely inspired genius.
The story of Agamemnon was dramatised by Aeschylus. The narrative of his bloody tragedy, which bears the King’s name and forms the first part of the celebrated Orestean trilogy, is inexorable and harrowing. Agamemnon was the commander of the Greek army that sacked Troy to avenge the seduction of Helen, the famous Grecian beauty, by the Trojan prince Paris. Before the siege, Agamemnon sacrificed to the gods his daughter, Iphigenia, to ensure the success of the mission.
The play opens nine years after the victorious conclusion of the war when Agamemnon returns home to his wife Clytemnestra at their palace in Argos. Clytemnestra welcomes him into the palace, then kills him with an axe, with the help of her lover Aegisthus, with whom she rules after Agamemnon’s death. The origins of the tragedy are buried in the past: Clytemnestra seeks retribution for Iphigenia’s murder, Aegisthus avenges his father, a victim of Agamemnon’s father’s cruelty. The consequences of the homicide reverberate into the future: years later, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes slays both Aegisthus and his mother. As punishment for his matricide, he is pursued and tormented by the terrible snake-haired goddesses known as the Furies.
Wilde regarded the Agamemnon as Aeschylus’ masterpiece. Indeed, he probably concurred with Mahaffy, who extolled it as ‘the greatest of [all] Greek tragedies’ for its ‘deep philosophy . . . grandeur and gloom’.29 Given his mother’s ‘furious admiration’ for J.S. Blackie’s translation of Aeschylus’ plays,30 as well as her fondness for declaiming from them, Wilde probably first encountered it as a boy through one of her dramatic recitations. He certainly knew it, practically by heart, during his time at Portora, where he ‘walked away’ from the entire school in an oral examination on the drama.31
Aeschylus’ play would prove to be one of Wilde’s lifelong literary romances – he often returned to it in later life. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it returned to him: as we shall see, rather like the Furies who hunt down Orestes, Agamemnon would pursue Wilde right up to his final years.
* Wilde’s annotations give the impression of a student engaged in an animated dialogue with the author. ‘Perhaps so;’ he says, for example, of the notion that the poet Hesiod had a low opinion of females, ‘but the Greeks attributed to Hesiod a panegyric on women.’11
* Archaeology must also have appealed to Wilde as a link between his classical studies and the Celtic culture of his childhood, during which he had assisted his father’s excavations of ancient Celtic sites. In Rambles Mahaffy makes the association between the cultures explicit by comparing finds in Greece and Ireland.