| Summary: | Oscar Wilde spent the first two decades of his life learning about Greece’s history before he ever set foot in the country. But his Philhellenism went beyond mere fascination with antiquity. This chapter examines his complex attitude towards the contemporary philhellenic scene. It argues that Wilde’s sustained attention to contemporary Greek geopolitics in his poems and travel writings, his documentation of same-sex desire, and his interventions within late nineteenth-century debates about classical culture reveal a model of time that fuses past, present, and future. Wilde’s Janus-headed approach to Modern Greece persisted throughout his career and was marked by keen attention to temporal and geographical tensions, particularly between Greek history and the modern world. Often in his works, there is a dynamic interplay between historical events, personal experience, and a not-yet-here queer future. Considered more broadly, Wilde’s intellectual practices regarding Modern Greece align with queer temporalities described by Elizabeth Freeman, Heather Love, J. Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz.
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