Victorian Philhellenism and Greek Love, with Daniel Orrells

Abstract

The Greeks – and the Athenians in particular – were lionised by the Victorians for their art, their culture, and their military prowess. But the ancient Greeks also worried the Victorians because they seemed to permit sexual relationships between males. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah and his guest, Professor Daniel Orrells, from the Department of Classics at King’s College London, explore the nineteenth-century debates about ‘Greek love’. Shivaike and Daniel talk about how Victorian men who were attracted to other males turned back to the ancient Greeks, and ask what we ought to make today of this example of Victorian philhellenism.

Bibliography

Open-source

Articles in Eidolon about love, sex, and classics

Emily Rutherford, ‘Dare to Speak Its Name: Pederasty in the Classical Tropes of Call Me By Your Name’, Eidolon (2018)

Paywalled

Alastair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)

Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Daniel Orrells, Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2015)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.