ABSTRACT
Many a classics conference ends with a paper on Nachleben: the survival and reinterpretation of some aspect of the classical tradition. As its title indicates, this chapter falls within the general definition of Nachleben, but its particular focus is Nacktheit-nudity. Despite the pun, this is not as frivolous as it might seem. Nudity (or rather, male nudity) was an important feature of Greek society; a cultural manifestation which the Greeks themselves perceived as an important distinction between themselves and barbaroi. What I am proposing to address here is the encoding of ‘Greekness’ in late Victorian and Edwardian England via the Greek (nude, male) body. This period is one in which the concept of ‘Hellenism’ was bandied about by great numbers of self-appointed legislators in all shades from true-blue to aesthetic mauve.1 The appeal to ‘Hellenism’ as a cultural value can mean many things; notably paganism, in contrast with Christianity, as it did to Matthew Arnold.2 It can also be used as an encoding of ‘deviant’ sexuality, as here, for instance, in Ronald Firbank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli: ‘chafing also in the same loose captivity would be the roguish niñas of the pleasureloving duchess of Sarmento, girls whose Hellenic ethics had given the good abbess more than one attack of fullness’.3
