Classical to Medical

Abstract

This chapter takes as its starting point the translation into English in 1871 of Plato’s Symposium, a series of dialogues devoted to the praise and nature of love. Benjamin Jowett, the distinguished classics scholar, introduced Plato to the University of Oxford in his reform of the Greats Curriculum, enshrining Plato, as Linda Dowling has argued, ‘at the institutional heart of elite Victorian values’.¹ Around the same time, the Symposium was reaching a wider audience: in 1839, Mary Shelley was in the process of arranging the posthumous publication of a complete edition of Shelley’s works, including the translation of the Symposium that she had transcribed for him in the late summer of 1818. She was necessarily guarded about Plato’s unequivocal validation of homosexuality, though, encountering objections to its publication in full (it would not be published in unexpurgated form until 1931). Within the university, Greek studies operated as a ‘homosexual code’.² ‘You’ve read the Symposium?’ Clive Durham asks Maurice, in E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel of same-sex love. Maurice, responding to their embryonic desire, had not known that ‘it’ could be mentioned, ‘and when Durham did so in the middle of the sunlit court a breath of liberty touched him’.³

First then, human beings were formerly not divided into two sexes, male and female; there was also a third, common to both others, the name of which remains, though the sex itself has disappeared. The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name, was common to both male and female; its name alone labours under a reproach.

Plato, Symposium

You must remember in our Universities, Plato is held to be little better than a misleader of youth.

Dr Folliott, Crotchet Castle