Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece by Iain Ross (review)

In Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, Iain Ross provides a detailed, comprehensive study of Oscar Wilde’s engagement with ancient Greek culture from his earliest days to the writing of De Profundis, published posthumously in part in 1905. In addition, Ross analyzes key texts about Greek culture as debated by Victorians, including Wilde’s father, William Wilde, who conducted archaeological field work in both Ireland and the Mediterranean basin. John Pentland Mahaffy and Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, two brilliant young classical scholars who instructed Wilde as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, exercised a lifelong influence. Reading these and other authorities, Ross offers an engaged account of critical issues in nineteenth-century classical studies.

Wilde’s wide-ranging interests in Greek matters (literary, philological, archaeological, epistemological, and ethical) pose a challenge to anyone who attempts to analyze them in detail. Drawing in part on Frank M. Turner’s The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), Ross responds by threading a number of thematic clusters through the book, interspersed with detailed discussions of Wilde’s epistolary, journalistic, and literary writings. Chief among these foci is the debate as to whether or not humanistic or archaeological approaches provided the best evidence for an understanding of Greek culture. This debate became especially relevant after 1870, when Wilde toured archaeological sites in Greece with Mahaffy and interest in classical archaeology intensified both in popular journalism and in theatrical spectacle—including attempts to mount ostensibly authentic productions of Greek tragedies featuring casts of young Oxford undergraduates. On the question, however, for Wilde there could be little doubt. Although an amateur archaeologist in his youth and a founding member of the Hellenic Society in 1879, and actively interested in Greek archeology until at least the late 1880s, the basis for Wilde’s humanism had already been laid in his days as a student at Portora Royal School, a grammar school in the north of Ireland. Higher education at Trinity College and in the school of Literae Humaniores at Oxford reinforced this bias, as did Wilde’s familiarity with the works of John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds.

The uses of the classical past were also debated. Wilde strongly disagreed with the historicist stance taken by Alexander Grant, who insisted, in his critical edition of Aristotle’s Ethics (1857), that the philosopher’s views were irrelevant to modern conditions. At the same time, Wilde also resisted attempts to enlist the Greeks in contemporary social causes—hence his disparagement of the radical MP George Grote’s standard History of Greece (1846–56). In a valuable addition to discussions of Wilde’s political tract, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), Ross demonstrates how Wilde’s endorsement of “statist philanthropism” in the 1880s gave way to a social anarchist position, in part a reaction against the attempt by the Oxford philosopher T. H. Green to recuperate the “Ethics as the grounds upon which Christian ethics enlarged” by endorsing “self-denial, selfsacrifice, and renunciation” (155, 156). Wilde shared Green’s criticism that the Ethics was narrowly restricted to the condition of male adult citizens of the autonomous Greek citystates, but he was unwilling to subordinate Aristotle’s emphasis on political freedom and individual self-realization to the practice of public and private philanthropy.

The discussion of the influence on Wilde of the Ethics, including Aristotle’s theory of friendship, is perhaps the most valuable part of Ross’s book. The undergraduate notes on pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophy and the Ethics that Ross includes as appendices demonstrate how early Wilde settled on certain key ideas: for example, a preference for inductive over deductive reasoning and for Socrates’s negative dialectic over Plato’s mythography. Wilde also shared Aristotle’s and Plato’s view that the world and humankind are “rational creations” and that the purpose of human life is “to live,” “to be” (Aristotle qtd. in Ross 205). Wilde experienced a lifelong...