| Sumario: | This article seeks to reconstruct the time Oscar Wilde spent in Greece as an undergraduate in the 1870s and the effect it had on his incipient Hellenism. Since Wilde's own account of the trip does not survive, the sources are an article published by one of his travelling companions, George Macmillan, and the two editions of Rambles and Studies in Greece by J.P. Mahaffy, Wilde's former tutor at Trinity College Dublin and a major influence on his intellectual and social development. The first edition was published before Mahaffy took Wilde and Macmillan with him to Greece; the second after, containing new material derived from this, his second trip. Many of the responses Macmillan records in his article can be traced to Mahaffy's book, which I argue provided a template to which Wilde and Macmillan could fit their encounter with Greece, an encounter experienced both as a loss and a recovery.
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