“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo…. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

In a witness box at the Old Bailey in London in 1895, Oscar Wilde is said to have offered this response to a lawyer who was cross-examining him about the meaning of a poem written by his younger lover, Alfred Douglas. Wilde was on trial for “gross indecency,” an expansive legal category then only a decade old that, unlike “sodomy,” could be proven through a variety of evidence other than that of physical sexual contact. Questioned about the meanings of his and friends’ writings, Wilde offered up a mythological lineage for “pure” same-sex love that had its origins in the ur-texts of intellectual Victorian England: the Bible and classical Greek philosophy. Due to the immense publicity attached to the celebrity scandal that was Wilde’s trial, this articulation circulated widely.

Today, as Zachary Herz wrote for Eidolon, appeals to antiquity are still a part of how same-sex relations are discussed within Anglo-American law. They also have a complicated relationship to the history of homosexuality. Historians have not agreed about whether it possible to talk about a concept of “homosexuality” that existed unchanged in all times and all places; or whether the paiderastia of Socrates’ elite circle in Athens, for example, which usually involved the one-sided passion of an older for a younger man, was such a fundamentally different set of norms and behaviors that it is not possible to consider it equivalent to modern age- and status-equal same-sex relationships.

These days, most classicists and modern historians would hold that there was no gay marriage in ancient Rome. But the practice of relating same-sex relations in antiquity closely to same-sex relations in the present itself has a history: located in Europe in the nineteenth century, and tied to the development of new approaches to classics and modern history that helped make them the disciplines we know today. Wilde may have thrilled and scandalized the British public, but his appeal to the classical tradition existed within a broader context of popular enthusiasm for a carefully-constructed classical past. Today, we see figures like Wilde as part of a story of countercultural struggle. But their queer classics was also a normative nineteenth-century classics — which it might take nineteenth-century historians like me properly to uncover.

If you were a boy who lived in Britain before around 1890, and if your parents were from the upper or middle class or had aspirations thereto, you would have begun to learn to read Latin in elementary school — perhaps even before you learned to read English. From the 1830s it became increasingly common for middle-class boys in particular to attend secondary school away from home, at one of the “public schools” formative of a social and professional elite. Until the Second World War, if you were expected to go to university, you probably began Greek by thirteen, and your education would have upheld classical languages as a form of knowledge that surpassed math, science, and certainly modern history and literature in importance. You would have read epics, tragedies, histories, and maybe some poetry, though this was strictly controlled to ensure that boys did not encounter any content that was too sexually suggestive. You would have performed Greek plays in editions with textual apparatus designed for schoolboys. In class, you would translate ex tempore from Greek and Latin into English; for homework, you would “turn” Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Matthew Arnold into Greek and Latin.

All of this prepared you to sit the entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge, which focused on Greek and Latin language. If you went to Oxford, for example, you would have studied more language, and later ancient literature, history, and philosophy, encountering Aristotle and Plato and maybe — if your tutor was very advanced — new philosophical ideas imported from the continent. From there, you might return to the family land or business, or else become a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a lawyer, a member of the military, the civil service, or the colonial service. Your classical education would have been all the preparation you needed to enter any such career.

It was hardly, then, only men who sought to give voice to “the Love that dare not speak its name” who moved comfortably in a world defined by classical languages and literatures. Greek and Roman history offered highly public, political languages in which to express the sensibility of the British Empire, and a shared knowledge of Greek and Latin united all men of a certain social class. Greek and Latin feature heavily in their private papers (such as letters and diaries). In these languages, men socialized and expressed their feelings of friendship. They were languages that wives and servants could not understand, and therefore in which secrets were told. Whether academically or salaciously, men could talk about sex and the body in Latin, rendering their communication decent as well as obscure. Women’s lack of Greek and Latin — in their own sex-segregated schools, they were taught French and German — kept them out of the universities and learned society. These were not homoerotic languages so much as simply masculine ones.

Yet a certain frisson centered on the homoerotic — as one eighteen-year-old discovered in 1858, when he encountered in a family friend’s house copies of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, far outside the bounds of his public school’s curriculum. As he recalled in an autobiography:

I read on and on, till I reached the end… and the sun was shining on the shrubs outside the ground-floor room in which I slept, before I shut the book up.

I have related these insignificant details because that night was one of the most important nights of my life…. I discovered the true liber amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a long-cherished idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato…. For the first time I saw the possibility of resolving in a practical harmony the discords of my instincts.

This boy, John Addington Symonds, grew up to cement the connection between a certain Hellenic tradition and what he called “eros ton adunaton,” the love of impossible things. He found in Plato and other classical describers of a “heavenly,” pure form of same-sex love between an older and a younger man a way of acting upon one’s desires that could be rendered compatible with Victorian ethical norms. As he explained in an essay called “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” Platonic paiderastia was a moral appreciation of beauty that could be distinguished from immoral forms of same-sex sex like prostitution. If classical Athenian society thought it normal and even laudable, Victorian society ought also to recognize it as such. Later, Symonds wrote books and pamphlets that engaged with a wider array of cultural touchstones, such as German sexual science and the poetry of Walt Whitman. In his day job, he made a name for himself as a serious historian of the Italian Renaissance. But classical Greece, and its ability to give same-sex love cultural validity, remained central to his vision.

Symonds wasn’t the first to use this sort of argument. In the 1770s, Jeremy Bentham — hardly a gay activist avant la lettre — wrote a manuscript essay arguing that it was not the state’s business to regulate any form of sexual activity conducted in private between consenting adults, and used ancient Greek examples as evidence that “paederasty” was not actively harmful to society. In the 1830s, the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier depicted the ancient world as an environment whose greater sexual license could serve as a model for modern social reform. Activists Karl-Maria Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs turned to classical models in their mid-nineteenth-century campaigns for reform of Prussian sodomy law. Ulrichs, innovatively, invoked the myth of souls divided in two that Aristophanes relates in Plato’s Symposium to articulate a vision of same-sex love not predicated on age inequality. Kertbeny coined the word “Homosexualität” — the bane of later classically-influenced writers and campaigners, to whom cramming a Greek and a Latin root into one word was indescribably ugly.

But Symonds was particularly successful at crafting a model of homosexual identity that responded to the moral quandaries felt by those who struggled with the norms of English society. Men like Wilde might have engaged with the work of critics such as Walter Pater who urged an amoral critical appreciation of beauty. But they saw Symonds’ more conservative vision — founded on the ethical good of a particular form of pure, elevated, elite, Platonic love that could be likened to the medieval ideal of chivalry — as the best hope for homosexuality’s widespread cultural acceptance, and perhaps as a route to self-acceptance as well.

Yet when Wilde tried out his tactic in the witness box, it failed miserably. Homosexuality already existed outside the control of writers with Oxford classics degrees: Wilde was one of countless men seeking same-sex sex in London, some of whom had already been implicated in serious public scandals. By the turn of the century, classical references served to unite not a social class, but rather special interest groups, such as academic researchers — or homosexuals. The jury found Wilde guilty of gross indecency as much for the classically-influenced aesthetics and homoerotic undertones of works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray as for evidence that he might have had sex with men.

After Wilde’s conviction, a not-so-underground subculture became terrified of what might happen to them. Some men who lived what we would now consider openly gay lives fled the country. Controversial books were published abroad, under pseudonyms, or not at all. Symonds’ widow and friends insisted that his name be taken off the title page of a book about sexual science on which he had collaborated with a progressive English doctor — a book which, in any case, had to be published in German. Well into the twentieth century, the reality of Symonds’ life and writing was aggressively hidden from his daughters, while writers such as E.M. Forster, W.H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood went seeking fulfillment in permissive Berlin or exotic Algiers. Sometimes the eyes of the establishment did not reach more rural areas, where the Cambridge-educated utopian socialist Edward Carpenter or the Anglo-American art connoisseur E.P. Warren lived in long-term relationships with men, dabbled in classics, and cited Symonds in their writing. But it would take dedicated campaigns of gay liberation to bring homosexuality out from under a cloud of suspicion. By then, the widespread cognizance of a classical tradition on which Symonds had counted no longer existed.

In 1914, Forster finished his novel Maurice, the first gay love story with a happy ending. The story of public-school- and Cambridge-educated Maurice and his love for working-class Alec could not see publication until 1971, after Forster’s death and after the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act decriminalized sex between men over the age of 21. Early in the novel, a schoolmaster asking his pupils to translate Plato interrupts with the command, “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” It is thanks to men like Forster, Wilde, and Symonds that this reference still had currency for Maurice’s 1970s readers — much as the word “homosexual” still records how early thinkers about same-sex love turned to antiquity in order to find a cultural context and a meaning for their desire.

Still, “homosexuality” was only one product of a moment when to be part of the English world of letters and ideas was to engage in classical reception. Men (and, later, women, claiming Sappho as the wellspring of their own tradition) often encountered homoeroticism within the pages of canonical classical authors because that was what they had. Even as it was recognized that some texts could be suspect or dangerous, English high culture saw itself as the natural heir to a society in which it just so happened that paiderastia had also flourished. Someone like Symonds could, by writing about “Greek ethics,” be upholding mid-to-late-Victorian social norms while simultaneously subverting them.

These days, we modern historians don’t receive a classical education as a matter of course. We’re a long way from the classically-educated Victorians who, in the period that I study, introduced modern history to schools and universities. If we’re equipped to understand the Greek and Latin in which men like Symonds often wrote and the ancient history and philosophy they referenced, for the most part it’s because we’re self-taught. Most of us can’t compete with professional classicists on their own turf. Accordingly, it’s largely classicists who have sought to understand this strange cultural milieu of the English fin de siècle, helping us to navigate the ways in which men like Symonds or Wilde read ancient texts and to understand the Greek and Latin they composed in their letters and diaries.

But sometimes classicists miss out on the nuances of the culture that I’ve tried to recover, however briefly, in this essay. Sometimes it takes historians of the nineteenth century to give a fair accounting of this moment when every upper- and middle-class boy had the skills to unlock the erotic secrets of ancient texts (Catullus and Ovid as well as Plato and Theognis), but social ruin was liable to fall on any who admitted it in public; when the standards of what could be said and done were very different in an Oxford common room and an Old Bailey courtroom, even if the same kinds of men were to be found in both; when Greek was newly an endangered species, an unintended casualty of the rise of modern history and literature and of the democratization of secondary and tertiary education. To tell these stories in all their complexities — as well as the story of how men like Symonds, Wilde, Forster, and many others created a gay tradition out of a classical one — classicists and modern historians must respect each other’s knowledge and methods. What is more, they must respect the still-present longing to see in ancient and more recent history justifications for the identity categories of the present, even as they subject that impulse to scrutiny.

Emily Rutherford is a doctoral candidate in History at Columbia University. Her research focuses on gender, classical education, and the culture of elite schools and universities in late-nineteenth-century Britain. You can read more of her writing at the Journal of the History of Ideas’ blog, which she co-edits.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.