The pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great that he failed to return to Oxford on the date fixed.

The Dons fined him forty-five pounds for the breach of discipline; but they returned the money to him in the following year when he won First Honours in "Greats" and the Newdigate prize.
This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of life which he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently perhaps in that talk with Pater already recorded.

But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless who _cannot_ believe,"[5] to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.
Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in the Vatican.

He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to the worship of the beautiful.
Another dominant characteristic of the young man may here find its place.
While still at Oxford his tastes--the bent of his mind, and his temperament--were beginning to outline his future.

He spent his vacations in Dublin and always called upon his old school friend Edward Sullivan in his rooms at Trinity.