Symonds and Classical Antiquity

The Works of Plato: A New and Literal Version, Chiefly from the Text of Stallbaum

Plato (Henry Cary, trans.). London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848.

This translation of Plato was the text Symonds used as a "crib" while at Harrow. Although assigned to read the Apology, he discovered on his own the Phaedrus and the Symposium, which so enraptured him that he stayed up an entire night reading. These dialogues on the nature of love, especially of that between two men, provided him "the revelation [he] had been waiting for", in regards to the Greeks' unique, positive views on same-sex love and the Greek ideal of love.

A Problem in Greek Ethics

J.A. Symonds. Ten copies privately printed, 1883.

This is the sixth copy from the original ten published by Symonds. This essay offered the most extensive study of Ancient Greek sexuality yet published in English. Symonds began writing this essay on Greek male-male love in 1873 "to explain the feelings of the Greeks about passion, to show how paiderastia was connected with their sense of beauty, and how it affected their institutions." It was later reprinted in the appendix of Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion (1897). This essay is essential in uderstanding Symonds' own life and had a significant influence on the emerging movement for gay rights.

Studies of the Greek Poets

J.A. Symonds. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873

Symonds’ Studies of the Greek Poets contributed to a then-fairly-new scholarly movement with the goal to “apply to the Greek poets the same sort of criticism as that which modern classics receive”. The focus was on the poets themselves rather than their works, and used this as a lens through which to look at other aspects of the Greek society. Although this work was published ten years earlier, Symonds wrote Studies of the Greek Poets simultaneously with his important work on Greek love, A Problem in Greek Ethics.