The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’

Abstract

Oscar Wilde was not simply the leading playwright, celebrity and wit of his generation; he was also an outstanding classical scholar during his time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford, and ancient Greece remained for him both a sounding board and touchstone throughout his life. Wilde’s pithy aphorism is therefore no mere, throw-away aside: on the contrary, it is informed by a deep understanding of perceived cultural differences at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In the post-Nietzschean, godless and increasingly industrial, modern Western world, the ‘soulless’ were regularly turning, as Wilde had been doing since his undergraduate days, to a pagan alternative where, as in humankind’s pre-lapsarian state, literal nakedness was the norm. The early Christian Fathers had denigrated the body; and the mediaeval Church had gone on to perpetuate the Platonic schism between body and soul, which Descartes confined absolutely to separate spheres during the seventeenth century. Behind Wilde’s witty summation is the widely shared view during the fin de siècle that, by turning to the Greeks, it might be possible to recover a ‘wholeness’ of being that Christianity and the modern world had torn asunder. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.