Simon David Goldhill (born 17 March 1957) is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge.[1]
He criticized the pathologization of hebephilia[2] and opposed the concealment of the sexual nature of man-boy relations in ancient Greece.
"But fortunately for historians, Ancient Greek pederasty is always there to throw a spanner in the machine of the ideologues who believe that human sexuality has a natural and ineluctably proper form."
"Greek pederasty is argued over so intently because it poses so sharply the question of the nature of male desire in society."[3]
Major publications
The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN 978-1-316-51290-6
Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-1-108-86002-4
A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain, University of Chicago Press, 2016
Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy, Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-199-79627-4
Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Brontë's Grave, University of Chicago Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-226-30131-0
The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-88774-8 (editor)
Jerusalem: City of Longing, Harvard University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-674-02866-1
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-226-30128-0
Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-03087-8 (editor)
Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-86212-7 (co-editor with Robin Osborne)
The Temple of Jerusalem, Harvard University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-674-06189-7
Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-226-30117-4 Excerpt
The Invention of Prose, Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-198-52523-3
Who Needs Greek?: Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-521-81228-3
Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-521-64247-7 (co-editor with Robin Osborne)
Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-521-47372-9
Art and Text in Greek Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-521-41185-1 (co-editor with Robin Osborne)
The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1991, ISBN 978-0-521-39062-0
Reading Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0-521-31579-1
Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia, Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-521-26535-5