“The Garden of Eros”: Ancient Mediterranean Gods and Heroes in the Decadent Poetics of Oscar Wilde

The paper justifies the accumulation of figures of ancient Mediterra nean gods and heroes in Oscar Wilde’s decadent poetics by interpreting a series of his (poetic, prose) works. The accumulation marks both a queer desire and admiration for extraordinary (androgynous) beauty, as well as passion, violence, transgression. Beauty does not go unpunished and hides terrible secrets. Dorian Gray immerses himself in forbidden pleasures, and the disintegration is reflected only in his portrait (narcissistic double). The hero Charmides (Wilde’s creation by inverting Plato) achieves erotic ecstasy only in death. The mythological heroes Narcissus, Endymion, Hylas, Ganymede, Hyacinth, and Adonis are desired, cruelly punished, elevated to the divine or sent to the lands of death. The boy Antinous, deified in imperial Roman Antiquity, becomes a favorite decadent symbol and embodiment of self-destruction. Wilde has a profound creative, artistic passion for evaluating and interpreting figures from the ancient (especially ancient Greek) mythology in a modern context.