Since Foucault's History of Sexuality, historians have traced in ever increasing detail the formation of modern sexual identities in the west. Relatively less attention has been addressed to historians, writers and intellectuals working between 1750 and 1910 who formulated their own plots for the history of sexuality. This book examines the significance of ancient Greek pederasty for the formation of scholarly historicism by German and English thinkers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. Rather than “Greek love” being simply a euphemistic signifier fo ... More

Since Foucault's History of Sexuality, historians have traced in ever increasing detail the formation of modern sexual identities in the west. Relatively less attention has been addressed to historians, writers and intellectuals working between 1750 and 1910 who formulated their own plots for the history of sexuality. This book examines the significance of ancient Greek pederasty for the formation of scholarly historicism by German and English thinkers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. Rather than “Greek love” being simply a euphemistic signifier for the secret signified “homosexuality,” this book examines how the pederastic—pedagogic relationship as exemplified in Plato's texts became a site for conceptualising the nature of the relationship between antiquity and modernity itself: precisely what did the Socratic teacher teach his pupil? What was the relationship between elder man and male youth? And how did this relationship inform modern discussions about the relationship between one generation and the next—between ancient and modern worlds? With the development of modern scholarly historicism in philhellenic Germany and Britain, Greek love provided the limit case for such scholarly endeavours invested in understanding how we moderns might be descended from a classical past. What sort of man did reading ancient Greek generate? From the work of Johann Matthias Gesner, the very first professor of philology at Göttingen, arguably the first modern European university, to Benjamin Jowett's Oxford, to the Oscar Wilde trials in London, to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic studies in Vienna, the question about the relevance of ancient Greek desires for modern masculinity has been posed and explored.