SOURCE: "A Problem in Greek Ethics," in Sexual Inversion, 1897. Reprint by Arno Press, 1975, pp. 245-47.

In the late-nineteenth century, Symonds and sexologist Havelock Ellis discussed working together to produce a study of homosexuality. When Ellis published his finished work in 1897, Symonds's contribution, written several decades earlier, was relegated to the appendix. Excerpted below, his "A Problem in Greek Ethics" presents the thesis he had wanted to include in the larger work: like many homosexual men of his generation educated at Oxford, Symonds emphasized the importance of male-male love to Hellenistic culture—a world that all Victorian scholars, heterosexual and homosexual, venerated.

Sensitive to every form of loveliness, and unrestrained by moral or religious prohibition, [the Greeks] could not fail to be enthusiastic for that corporeal beauty, unlike all other beauties of the human form, which marks male adolescence no less triumphantly than does the male soprano voice upon...