Simon Goldhill

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.

He criticized the pathologization of hebephilia 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."

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