Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity

The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Daniel Orrells examines how the pederastic-pedagogic relationship, as exemplified in Plato's texts, became a site for conceptualizing the nature of the relationship between antiquity and modernity itself: precisely what did the Socratic teacher teach his pupil? What was the relationship between older man and male youth? And how did this relationship inform modern discussions about the relationship between one generation and the next, as well as between ancient and modern worlds? What sort of man did the reading of ancient Greek generate? From the work of Johann Matthias Gesner, the very first professor of philology at Gttingen, to Benjamin Jowett's Oxford, to the Oscar Wilde trials in London, to Sigmund Freud's studies in Vienna, the meaning of ancient Greek desires for modern masculinity is explored and examined.