11

Alexander’s Sex Life

Daniel Ogden

Alexander has never seemed quite the same since the twentieth century’s discovery of “that horrid thing which Freud calls sex,”¹ and the development of the notion that one’s sexuality was somehow a vital determinant of or an indispensable key to the understanding of one’s nature and one’s identity. At time of writing much of the attention given to Alexander on the Internet is from gay-interest websites attempting to appropriate historical figures or find role models of gravitas. The bulk of the press reaction to Oliver Stone’s recent movie Alexander (Warner Brothers, 2004) has focused on his representation of the king’s sexuality (this is the first mainstream movie to be frank about Alexander’s homosexual adventures, although it declines to enact them with the vigor it reserves for his heterosexual ones).² It may defy belief that there could be public demonstrations and riots over any point of ancient history in the modern world, but such there were in Thessaloniki in 2002 over precisely the issue of homosexuality in the ancient Macedonian court.³

The problem of Alexander’s sex life first came to the fore in English-language scholarship over half a century ago, in 1948, when the great W. W. Tarn included an extraordinary appendix entitled “Alexander’s Attitude to Sex” in his biography Alexander the Great.⁴ The appendix was in some ways old-fashioned, but in other ways rather ahead of its time. It was old-fashioned in that the Victorian Tarn (his more casual detractors give less attention than they should to the fact that he was born as early as 1869) strove, understandably, to preserve an image of Alexander that those of good Christian family values could continue to admire.⁵ So, despite copious and lucid prima facie indications in the source tradition that Alexander enjoyed numerous affairs both homosexual and heterosexual, and also that he practiced polygamy, Tarn strove to project him rather as a man who found the necessity for sex tedious and regrettable, but who was securely heterosexual when necessity called, and disinclined to extramarital adventure.⁶ But, for all this, Tarn may be considered ahead of his time for his implicit assumption of the importance of Alexander’s sexuality for the understanding of the man and his achievements.⁷

Tarn’s attempt “to straighten the matter out”⁸ and to close the question down was to have the opposite effect to that intended. This was not simply because the time for the question of Alexander’s sexuality had come and Tarn’s discussion bestowed a counter-productive legitimacy upon the subject, but it was also because Tarn’s strength of feeling led him to compromise his own remarkable philology in striking fashion. The mishandling of evidence and argument alike conferred a rare notoriety on the appendix, which has been particularly celebrated since Badian’s dissection of it in 1958, the year after Tarn’s death, in an article subtitled “a study in method.”⁹ Then Tarn’s regretted subject received a further fillip in the late 1970s, as the sexual liberation of the 1960s belatedly arrived in the world of Classical scholarship. Ground-breaking and popularizing studies of sexual codes of practice in the ancient world, starting with Dover’s seminal Greek Homosexuality, conferred new legitimacy on the study of Alexander’s sex life and seemed to offer new possibilities for insight into it.¹⁰ And it is against the context of these that investigations of Alexander’s sexuality, almost inevitably inconclusive ones, continue to be published.¹¹

But nothing more of substance is ever going to be established about the historical sexuality of Alexander the Great. Indeed, we have no particular reason to suppose that his sexuality was even understood by his contemporaries. Who, I ask again, is to know the secrets of the boudoir?¹² One may go so far as to wonder whether it was understood by the man himself. And even if it was, we have no prospect whatsoever of recovering that understanding.¹³ And so far as the sources for Alexander are concerned, or what I would prefer to call “the literary tradition about Alexander,” we continue to run up against the problem that sex and sexuality always were just “too good to think with,” just as they still are. So statements about Alexander’s sexuality in our texts may tell us much about the literary tradition itself, or about the agendas of its individual writers, but they can tell us little of the man’s historical sexuality. In illustration of this I shall devote the final pages of this paper to a study of Curtius’ portrayal of Alexander’s relationship with Bagoas. But the best we can hope to do from the historical perspective is to gain access to and to reconstruct the general, public patterns or modes of sexuality in the society¹⁴ within which Alexander lived and to locate what is said of Alexander’s own sex life within these, and this will constitute the focus of the bulk of this paper.

Alexander’s Girls

First, let us briefly review the data.¹⁵ The tradition provides credible testimony to four significant relationships with women on Alexander’s part. In around 332 he began a relationship with Barsine (Berve, no. 206; Heckel 70), the Hellenized daughter of the Persian noble Artabazus (Berve, no. 152; Heckel 55).¹⁶ The relationship endured for five years or more, for it was not until 327 that she bore Alexander the first of his children we know of, Heracles (Berve, no. 353; Heckel 138).¹⁷ And it was in 327 also that Alexander married the partner most celebrated and romanticized in his tradition, the captive Bactrian noblewoman Roxane (Berve, no. 688; Heckel 241–2).¹⁸ A delightful example of this romanticization may be found above all in Lucian’s ecphrasis of Aetion’s painting The Wedding of Roxane and Alexander, which showed one team of beaming putti-cupids helping Roxane to undress for her first night with Alexander, while another played with Alexander’s discarded armor.¹⁹ She miscarried or gave birth to a short-lived son at the Hydaspes in 326,²⁰ and was eight months pregnant on Alexander’s death in 323 with the future Alexander IV.²¹ At the mass marriages Alexander organized for his companions with Persian noblewomen at Susa in 324 he himself took on two wives at once: Barsine-Stateira (Berve, no. 722; Heckel 256–7), eldest daughter of the last and overthrown Persian king Darius III, and Parysatis (Berve, no. 607; Heckel 192), youngest daughter of the penultimate Persian king Artaxerxes III Ochus.²²

The most general and significant frame against which these relationships should be contextualized is that of Macedonian royal polygamy. We can be sure that Alexander kept his wives in polygamy (as opposed to serial monogamy) for two principal reasons. First, the marrying of two women on the same day and at the same ceremony, as Alexander did at Susa, is peculiarly difficult to reconcile with all but the most economical of approaches to monogamy. Second, Roxane was not only pregnant with Alexander’s child after the subsequent marriages to Barsine-Stateira and Parysatis, but she was clearly still installed at the center of his life as he died, since she tended him on his deathbed.²³

This phenomenon of Macedonian royal polygamy, long suppressed in the scholarship of ancient Macedon, in defiance of numerous direct and explicit testimonies, and many more indirect ones, is now generally accepted.²⁴ The most graphic of all the testimonies to Macedonian royal polygamy (but far from the only one) is found in a fragment of Satyrus the Peripatetic preserved by Athenaeus actually in the context of a discussion of polygamy. Here Satyrus lists seven wives of Philip II, in the order of acquisition, and repeatedly uses terms that indicate that the wives were acquired additionally to each other.²⁵ Satyrus (or perhaps Athenaeus, introducing the quotation) is the only ancient writer to give a rationale for such polygamy, and it is a military-diplomatic one: “Philip . . . used to make his marriages in accordance with war.” We might wish to offer other additional reasons. One might be the display of the king’s unique status, or of his exceptional level of wealth. Another might be the desire to sire as many children as possible, perhaps again as a marker of status, or perhaps for use. Since Macedonian kings and their princes were warriors who led from the front, it was advisable to have as many sons as possible; and girls offered the opportunity of making diplomatic marriage alliances. Another reason again might be the fact that murderous competition between polygamously held wives and their respective lines of offspring tended to deplete the numbers of princes that could aspire to compete for the throne on their father’s death. Hence, paradoxically, it must always have seemed advisable to marry yet more women and father yet more children: polygamy was a tiger too dangerous for its riders to dismount.²⁶

Alexander’s polygamous marriages accordingly fell into an established cultural pattern within the Macedonian court (as they did indeed in the Persian court annexed by Alexander),²⁷ and we cannot proceed in any direct way from the fact of them to conclusions about Alexander’s own sexuality. And, other considerations apart, a military-diplomatic purpose can be easily advanced in the case of each of the unions. The union with Barsine may have gratified Parmenion and may further have been an attempt to conciliate the Persian aristocracy.²⁸ The union with Roxane may have placated Bactria.²⁹ The Susa marriages expressed Alexander’s claim to be the successor to the Achaemenids, and in any case took place in the context of a larger policy to integrate the Macedonian and Persian nobilities.³⁰

But the record of Alexander’s wives and sirings does, perhaps, give the lie to one particular trend in the ancient tradition, the one that represents Alexander as extremely restrained or even undermotivated in sex.³¹ This is the trend that represents Alexander as agynnis, an “effeminate,” or probably more accurately, a “eunuch.”³² In similar vein Plutarch speaks of Alexander’s restraint with the beautiful captured womenfolk of Darius, demonstrating his self-control , and indeed claims that he knew no other woman prior to Barsine.³³ By contrast, Alexander’s father Philip has the name of having been reasonably vigorous in his siring career, and yet, according to one way of looking at the figures, Alexander was more vigorous still. We can compare Philip and Alexander from similar baselines, as both men acquired the partners from whom they begat their first attested offspring at the age of 24. Philip, born in 382, seems to have married Audata, the mother of Cynna (and indeed his second wife, Phila) in 358. Alexander, born in 356, acquired Barsine, mother of Heracles, in 332. Philip lived on twenty-two years beyond the baseline, dying at 46 in 336. Within this time he sired six children, according to the Satyrus fragment referred to above, and many scholars would like to add a seventh, the Caranus referred to by Justin, to this total.³⁴ Seven attested impregnations in twenty-two years produces an attested impregnation rate of one every 3.1 years. Alexander lived just eight years beyond his baseline, dying at 32 in 323. As we have seen, he had, as the tradition knows, given rise to three attested impregnations by the time of his death in 323: Heracles by Barsine, Roxane’s miscarriage at the Hydaspes,³⁵ and Alexander IV, also by Roxane. Three attested pregnancies in eight years produces an attested impregnation rate of one every 2.7 years, which is actually slightly superior to that of his father’s.

The tradition celebrates in addition several supposedly casual liaisons between Alexander and various women. Indeed Alexander, gynnis or otherwise, is associated with more women in the tradition than is any other Macedonian king. While it may well be that a historical event of some sort underlies some of these liaisons, the accounts of them are so obviously and heavily ficitionalized that they can offer us nothing in the attempt to reconstuct even the broader sexual codes of the Macedonian court in which Alexander lived, let alone in the attempt to reconstruct Alexander’s own sexuality.

The accounts may be briefly reviewed.³⁶ They fall into two broad categories, the first of which is courtesans, of whom three are found. Already from Cleitarchus, Alexander was associated with Thais, the courtesan who came to be associated with Ptolemy in Alexandria, and bore him the children Lagus, Leontiscus, and Eirene. She it was, supposedly, who supposedly instigated and enacted the burning of Persepolis.³⁷ It is possible that her inclusion in the traditions relating to the campaign court was retrospective. According to Theophrastus, Callixeina, a Thessalian courtesan, was introduced to the adolescent Alexander by Philip and Olympias in order to cure him of or divert him from his gynnis condition. Credible or otherwise, it is noteworthy that this tale was developed very soon after Alexander’s death, with Theophrastus writing in the late fourth century or very early third.³⁸ Aelian tells that the artist Apelles, a highly romanticized figure,³⁹ “loved the concubine [pallake] of Alexander, whose name was Pancaste, and she was Larisan by birth. They say that she was the first woman Alexander had sex with.”⁴⁰ Pancaste looks rather like a doublet of Callixeina: both hail from Thessaly; both have a courtesan-like designation; and both are, ostensibly, the first woman with whom Alexander has sex.⁴¹

The second category consists of the recurring motif of the queen transitorily encountered by Alexander in the course of his campaign, who uses him as stud to beget children. The most striking and prominent example of this motif is that of Thal(l)estris, the Amazon queen who supposedly presented herself to Alexander “for the sake of child-making” . She was mentioned by Cleitarchus, and was already so established in the Alexander tradition when Aristobulus and Ptolemy wrote that they felt the need to deny it, as, reportedly, did no less an authority than King Lysimachus.⁴² According to Justin, Cleophis or Cleophylis, the queen of Indian Beira (which Arrian calls Bazira), ransomed her captured citadel by sleeping with the king and going on to bear a son she named “Alexander.”⁴³ This narrative is in turn perhaps a calque on the Thalestris tradition. It also seems to have been remodeled to reenact the Augustan version of Cleopatra VII’s relationships with Caesar and Antony, the queen supposedly ransoming back Egypt from them by sleeping with them and bearing them children (and in Caesar’s case a child that shared his name). Justin reports that Cleophis acquired the name of “royal whore” (scortum regium) among the Indians, a designation which may reflect “the harlot queen of old Canopus.”⁴⁴ Two further episodes perhaps reflect the “pull” of this motif also. Arrian tells that Ada of Alinda adopted Alexander himself as her own son,⁴⁵ while the late and ostentatiously fictional Pseudo-Callisthenic Alexander Romance gives us Candace, the Ethiopian queen expressing a desire for sons like Alexander.⁴⁶

Thalestris and her Amazons are particularly interesting. In presenting herself to Alexander for stud purposes, she is right at home in the context of the richly elaborated Amazon myths and traditions. Various accounts of their society describe their casual use of men for mere insemination.⁴⁷However, if one surveys the copious literary remains of the complex of Classical Amazon myths in general, one sees that these accounts agree that the Amazons had been completely exterminated in the remote past. The invasion of the Athens of Theseus had been their last, disastrous stand, though some, under Penthesilea, had struggled on into the time of the Trojan War, to disappear at that point for ever.⁴⁸ The function of the myth, in this respect, was to distance such a threateningly topsy-turvy, women-on-top world from all that was familiar, near, historical, and real. So, for all that Alexander had progressed far beyond the Amazons’ traditional homeland of Themiscyra, adjacent to the Thermodon, the generation of the notion that he came to encounter Amazons themselves, whatever its historical starting point (Atropates?)⁴⁹ was in striking defiance of a great weight of established tradition.⁵⁰

Alexander’s Boys

Let us again begin with a brief review of the data. Alexander is given sexual relationships with three men in the tradition, Hephaestion, Bagoas, Excipinus(?), and perhaps Hector son of Parmenion, although the evidence for the last two is vestigial.⁵¹ A substantial number of texts represent Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion as particularly close.⁵² A more limited number assert or strongly imply that they had a sexual relationship. The most explicit, although far from unproblematic, of these is Arrian’s decontextualized observation:

(Note) that Alexander garlanded the tomb of Achilles and Hephaestion that of Patroclus, the latter riddling that he too was a beloved of Alexander, in just the same way as Patroclus was of Achilles. (Aelian, Varia Historia 12.7)⁵³

Next in importance is a passing reference in Arrian’s Dissertationes [sc. Epicteteae] ab Arriano digestae, which presumably reflects, in the first instance, the words of Epictetus rather than of Arrian.⁵⁴ Although it does not mention Hephaestion by name, it does say that Alexander ordered the temples of Asclepius to be burned when his  died.⁵⁵ This is likely to be a reference to the roughly similar measures that Arrian tells us in his own voice that Alexander took after Hephaestion’s 324 death in the Anabasis. ⁵⁶ Justin seems to imply that Hephaestion was Alexander’s  in observing that he was dear to Alexander because of his beauty and his boyishness and because of the services he performed for him (from which sexual services cannot be absolutely excluded): formae, pueritiae, obsequiis.⁵⁷ Curtius uniquely speaks of a man, whose name, according to one MS, was Excipinus,⁵⁸ in terms which similarly strongly imply that he was an  of Alexander but which also make it clear that he served as a sort of replacement for Hephaestion: “. . . Excipinus, still quite young and beloved to Alexander because of the flower of his youth. Although he equalled Hephaestion in the beauty of his body, he was certainly not equal to him in manly charm.” This is the only reference in the tradition to Excipinus.⁵⁹

If the relationship was indeed a sexual one, then it can be contextualized in this regard against known homosexual relationships in and around the Macedonian court. The sensitivities associated with them had often erupted into regicide. Aristotle tells that the killers of Archelaus, Crateuas and Hellenocrates of Larissa, had been former eromenoi of the king.⁶⁰ He also tells that Amyntas the Little had been killed by Derdas after taunting him with his “youthfulness,” which is probably a euphemistic description of the misuse of an eromenos.⁶¹ Diodorus tells how Philip was famously killed by a former eromenos Pausanias, in the finale of a complex dispute which also involved another of Philip’s eromenoi, also called Pausanias.⁶² However, Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion is likely to have fallen more particularly into the pattern of homosexual relationships between age-peers that are typical of the military elites, and the training bodies for those elites, found in a number of Greek societies, notably Sparta and Thebes. In the case of Macedon, the initial breeding ground for such relationships appears to have been the corps of the Royal Pages (basilikoi paides). ⁶³ Alexander and Hephaestion were, so far as we can tell, exact contemporaries. Curtius tells that they were brought up together.⁶⁴ We hear of other peer relationships formed among the Royal Pages. Two of the boys involved in the Conspiracy of the Pages were Hermolaus and Sostratus. Arrian explicitly declares that Sostratus was the same age as Hermolaus and his .⁶⁵ Also involved in the plot was another Page, Epimenes. Arrian refers also to his lover, Charicles, and it is likely, from context, that this Charicles was also one of the Pages.⁶⁶ In a passage of scurrilous, humorous abuse of the Macedonian Companions, Theopompus spoke of them having sex with each other, for all that they were all bearded.⁶⁷

However, we cannot invoke this sort of contextualization – peer homosexuality in a military context – for the relationship Alexander is held to have had with the Persian eunuch Bagoas. Indeed, this is a relationship that we cannot hope to contextualize at all, since there was no known history of eunuchism at the Macedonian court. But, as with Hephaestion, the tradition appears to represent him consistently in the role of a Classical, Athenian-style eromenos to Alexander. What we hear in fact consists of seven (or possibly just six) testimonies, two of which substantially overlap.⁶⁸

We are told emphatically that Alexander had a sexual relationship with the eunuch by Plutarch in the context of his tale about the theater (whatever kind of theater it was)⁶⁹ in Gedrosia:

When Alexander arrived at the palace of Gedrosia,⁷⁰ he restored the army with a festival. It is said that he got drunk and watched choral competitions. His beloved  Bagoas won in the dancing and he traversed the theater in his costume and sat down beside him. Seeing this, the Macedonians applauded and shouted out, bidding Alexander kiss him, until he embraced him and kissed him deeply ⁷¹ (Plu. Alex. 67.8)

The tale originated, as it seems, with Dicaearchus in c.320 (this is the overlapping testimony):⁷²

Alexander the king loved boys to distraction . At any rate, Dicaearchus says in his Sacrifice at Ilium that he was so enthralled with  the eunuch Bagoas that in the view of the entire theater he bent back and kissed him deeply, and when the audience shouted approval and applauded, he did as they bid and bent back and kissed him again. (Ath. 603b, incorporating Dicaearchus F23 Wehrli)

But even in this story, Bagoas is nothing more than a cypher, and while we must concede that we are told that he had a sexual relationship with Alexander, we are given nothing with which to color in this outline.

For such color, we depend on Curtius, who gives us two developed narrative episodes featuring the eunuch, but the value of such color, for the historical reconstruction of Alexander’s love life is almost nil, because the impact of an elaborate structuring upon it can be clearly detected. To make the case, I shall devote the remainder of this piece to a more detailed analysis of Curtius’ material. Several of the more important texts and narratives bearing upon Alexander’s sexuality could sustain similar treatment. First, in book 6, Bagoas is given to Alexander among the gifts of Darius’ chiliarch Narbazanes:

. . . amongst which was Bagoas, a eunuch of exceptional appearance and in the very flower of boyhood, with whom Darius had had a relationship, and with whom Alexander soon had one; and was because he was most greatly moved by Bagoas’ prayers that he spared Narbazanes. (Curt. 6.5.22–3)⁷³

And then in book 10⁷⁴ we are told, at greater length, of the story of Darius’ general Orsines (or Orxines). He meets Alexander’s advance in Pasargadae and gives the king and his friends gifts, so winning them over initially, but his generosity was his undoing (10.1.22–42):

For when he had honored all the king’s friends with gifts beyond their prayers, he had no honor for the eunuch Bagoas, who had enslaved him to himself by giving up his body to him. Some people advised Orsines that Bagoas was dear to the king, but he replied that he was honoring the friends of the king, not his prostitutes, and it was not customary for the Persians to consider as male those rendered effeminate by fornication.⁷⁵ On hearing this, the eunuch directed the power he had attained by means of outrage and disgrace against an innocent and most honorable person. (Curt. 10.1.25–7)⁷⁶

Curtius goes on to explain how Bagoas drips poisonous thoughts about Orsines into the king’s ears and sets up Persian stooges to incriminate him:

And the most shameless prostitute, not forgetting deception even in the midst of fornication and the passive experience of disgrace, whenever he had inflamed the king’s love for him, accused Orsines sometimes of greed, sometimes even of disloyalty. (Curt. 10.1.29)

Bagoas is given direct speech, in which he tells Alexander that Orsines has plundered the wealth he has given to him from the tomb of Cyrus, and then brings in his stooges to support his allegations (10.1.33–5). The king accordingly has Orsines executed (10.1.36–8).

Not content with the execution of an innocent man, the eunuch himself struck Orsines as he was about to be killed. Orsines looked at him and said “I had heard that women had once ruled in Asia, but this is something new: that a eunuch should rule!” (Curt. 10.1.37)

Curtius concludes his narrative of the Orsines episode with comments on Alexander’s decline. A little earlier he had not been able to execute Alexander of Lyncestus, despite clear evidence, but now:

At the end of his life he has so far declined from his own nature that, despite once having a mind resistant to lust, he now, at the whim of a prostitute, gave kingdoms to some and took life from others. (Curt. 10.1.40–2)⁷⁷

Curtius, we should note, is emphatic about the fact that Alexander had a sexual relationship with Bagoas (obsequio corporis devinxerat sibi; ne in stupro quidem et dedecoris patientia fraudis oblitum, quotiens amorem regis in se accenderat). The general tenor of Curtius’ material is consonant with the generalization made by Plutarch, which constitutes our final, vague, testimony for Bagoas: “Alexander freely allowed the Hagnons and the Bagoases and the Hagesiases and the Demetriuses to derail him as they performedproskynesis before him, dressed him up, manipulated him as if he were some barbarian effigy.”⁷⁸ However, the general tenor seems to be contradicted by Curtius’ summary analysis of Alexander’s character. The basic line is that his good qualities derived from nature, his bad ones from his fortune and his youth:

He was moderate in his immoderate desires. He had sex only within the limits of natural desire. He experienced no pleasure save that which is allowed. And these qualities were certainly the gifts of his character/nature. (Curt. 10.5.32)⁷⁹

These remarks are platitudes based upon Peripatetic notions of enkrateia. That they sit so ill with the story Curtius has recently completed suggest that the story has a certain momentum and internal logic of its own.

The key point, and one that has seemingly evaded attention, is that there is a tight set of responsions between the Narbazanes tale and the Orsines tale. In both episodes a surrendering Persian general meets Alexander’s advance, begging to be spared. Both men seek to insure this by giving lavish gifts. In the Orsines episode Bagoas himself effects the decision to spare; in the second he himself effects the decision to kill. The parallelism between the episodes certainly helps to convey a decline of a sort in Alexander, and this is almost explicit in Curtius’ words. But the story is also very much one of Bagoas’ own thwarted aspiration, and makes much of the motif of the gift: it is Bagoas’ aspiration to progress from the status of a gift himself, an owned slave, to one who receives gifts.

There are more fundamental issues at stake too, and these are revealed by Orsines’ first insult to Bagoas: “he was honoring the friends of the king, not his prostitutes, and it was not customary for the Persians to consider as male those rendered effeminate by fornication.” The last phrase is a little odd: it might be thought that Bagoas had been rendered effeminate by castration rather more than by fornication, but the Classical Greeks had certainly been familiar with the idea that an excessive devotion to sex, whether homosexual, as in the case of Aeschines’ Timarchus (also, supposedly, a prostitute),⁸⁰ or indeed heterosexual, as in the case of the adulterer,⁸¹ rendered one effeminate, and this seems to be the idea here. But the key point lies in the non sequitur between the two parts of Orsines’ insult: another premise needs to be supplied, to the effect that only males are worthy of gifts. And so we see that Bagoas’ craving for gifts does not merely proceed from greed or a desire to aggrandize himself, but from a desire to recover or at any rate symbolically restore his lost manhood. While the eunuch may seek power (potentiam . . . quaesitam) as a simulacrum of masculinity, he can achieve it only through a feminizing act. The observation delivered by Orsines before he dies, regnare castratum, is at one level to be read literally, as an indictment of the condition of Alexander’s regime. Bagoas has come to such a position of influence with Alexander that he effectively rules Asia (one may also wonder whether Alexander himself might fit the bill as metaphoricalcastratus regnans, emasculated by his subjection to Bagoas). But regnare castratum is also an insult, a bitter paradox, honed for the Bagoas who has just hit Orsines: for all that he may rule, he remains castrated.

Accordingly, these two episodes intertwine tragic arcs for both Orsines and, more to the point, Bagoas himself. The story, I submit, is simply too good, and should not be used to draw any conclusions about the nature of Alexander’s relationship with Bagoas, or about the development of it. The language applied to Bagoas on the whole indicates that the tradition integrated him into Alexander’s story in the role of a Classical, Athenian-style eromenos, however old he was in fact: Curtius refers to his pueritia, Plutarch refers to him as an , and Athenaeus introduces his reference to him with the claim that Alexander was  . . . , as we have seen.⁸² The curious remarks attributed to Orsines in his initial insult (nec moris esse Persis mares ducere qui stupro effeminarentur), however, perhaps rather cast Bagoas in the role of the adult kinaidos, rendered effeminate by his craving for (homosexual) sex rather than by the knife.

The general conclusion of this piece may strike some as curiously close to the Tarnism with which we began, in that it has attempted to remove much of the most colorful and engaging material in the Alexander tradition bearing upon Alexander’s sexuality from the debate about his sexuality as a historical phenomenon. While I, in contrast to Tarn, am inclined to accept Alexander’s heterosexual “promiscuity” (insofar as this concept has any real significance) and homosexual encounters, it is not because I have significantly greater confidence in the historical value of the individual relevant parts of the Alexander tradition. It is rather because the tradition’s representation of Alexander’s sex life, in outline, if not in detail, allows it to conform to the patterns of sex life reconstructable for Philip before him and for other Macedonian kings. In short, a continent, strictly heterosexual and non-“promiscuous” Alexander is ultimately harder to understand and explain in historical context than the opposite.

¹ Nancy Mitford, attributing the phrase, perhaps erroneously, to E. F. Benson’s marvelous Lucia, at Benson 1977: x.

² For an account of the discussions behind the portrayal of Alexander’s sexuality in this movie, see Lane Fox 2004: 27–8 (where we also learn that Lane Fox’s 1973 Alexander book was once marketed as “the dashing story of the spellbinding young gay who conquered the world”), 33–4, 40–1, 53–4, 67, 69.

³ The events took place on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 at the Institute for Balkan Studies’ Seventh International Symposium on Ancient Macedon (the conference that gives rise to the proceedings Ancient Macedonia/Archaia Makedonia) in and around the Hall of the Society for Macedonian Studies in Thessaloniki. Advance publicity had attracted the wrath of the local “nationalist” (to spare other words) party, Laos, to that evening’s session, and the leaders duly arrived with mob and camera crew in train. Some forty police were deployed to protect the delegates. The principal incitement was Kate Mortensen’s paper on “Homosexuality at the Macedonian Court,” but offense was taken also at the adjacent papers, my own on “A War of Witches at the Court of Philip II?” (Philip could never have had any part of such an unchristian thing) and Ernst Badian’s on “The Death of Philip II” (Badian’s crime was to have doubted the Hellenism of the ancient Macedonians in earlier work). The three of us were branded as “agents of Skopje.” Accounts of the events, of varying degrees of accuracy, and commentaries upon them may be found in the Greek newspapers for the following days. Here I confine myself to quoting from a down-market “nationalist” organ Stochos (“Target,” appropriately), for Thursday, October 17: “So who are these three anti-Greeks? Daniel Ogden has written tens of books in order to demonstrate that the ancient Greeks lived in a Dark Age of magic, prostitution, homosexuality, bastard children, adultery, etc.” (p. 8). What I take to be the now canonical “nationalist” account of the affair may be found at Georgiades 2002: 191–9 (with care!).

⁴ Tarn ii. 319–26.

⁵ For Tarn ii, esp. 399–449, Alexander was in any case a Jesus before Jesus, most notably in the ambitions he attributed to him for “The Unity of Mankind.”

⁶ Tarn also attempted, in similar style, to deny the existence of Alexander’s “mistress” Barsine, the mother of his son Heracles (Tarn ii. 330–8; answered by Brunt 1975). For the possibility that Barsine should be seen as Alexander’s wife, see Brosius 1996: 78 and Ogden 1999: 42–3.

⁷ Tarn ii. 319 saw himself as reacting to the brief philological review of the sources for Alexander’s love life in Berve’s Alexanderreich (Berve i. 10–11).

⁸ Tarn ii. 319.

⁹ Badian 1958b.

¹⁰ Dover 1978; note also Buffière 1980; Foucault 1984; Halperin 1990; Halperin et al. 1990; Winkler 1990; and Davidson 1997 (a substantial new study specifically devoted to Greek homosexuality is awaited from the last).

¹¹ E.g., Reames-Zimmermann 1999.

¹² See Ogden 1996b: 110.

¹³ I recall the (unpublished) observations of Elizabeth Rawson, erstwhile Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who protested that the only minds of the ancient world we could even aspire to know were those of Cicero and St. Augustine, this by virtue of the voluminous and ostensibly personal nature of the writings they had left behind.

¹⁴ Perhaps we should say “societies,” not least when we think of the Persian court context of Bagoas. For discussion of Persian court eunuchism see Llewellyn-Jones 2002 and Briant 1996: 279–97.

¹⁵ For a recent review of the women of Alexander’s court, see Carney 2003b, only a relatively limited part of which, however, is devoted to Alexander’s sexual partners (242–52), subsequent to Carney 2000b: 97–113.

¹⁶ Plu. Alex. 21; Eum. 1. For Barsine, subsequent to Tarn and Brunt as cited above, see now Carney 2000b: 101–5, 149–50; 2003b: 243–5.

¹⁷ D.S. 20.20.2: Heracles was “about 17” in 309; pace Just. 14.6, 14.13, and 15.2.3, implying a birth date for Heracles as late as 324; see also Ogden 1999: 42–3.

¹⁸ See, in particular, Arr. 4.19.5–6, 4.20.4; Plu. Alex. 47; Mor. 332c–e, 338d; Str. C517; Curt. 8.4.21–30, 8.5.7; D.S. 17.30, 18.3.3; Just. 12.15.9, 13.2.5–9. The motif of love-at-first-sight romance is strong in these texts. For Roxane see Carney 2000b: 105–7, 146–8; 2003b: 245–6. For the wedding, see, above all, Renard and Servais 1955.

¹⁹ Lucian, Herodotus or Aetion 4–6. As Kilburn 1959 notes, the motif of the putti playing with discarded armor was to be adopted by Botticelli in his Venus and Mars (National Gallery, London, NG915). See also Lucian, Eikones 7.

²⁰ Metz Epitome 70.

²¹ Just. 13.2.5; cf. Curt. 10.6.9 (six months) and, for the child’s birth, Arr. Succ. FGrH 156 F9.

²² Arr. 7.4.4–8; D.S. 17.107.6; Plu. Alex. 70; Mor. 329d–e, 338d; Just. 12.10.9–10; Memnon FGrH 434 F4.4; App. Syr. 5. For the marriages to Barsine-Stateira and Parysatis, see Carney 2000b: 108–12; 2003b: 246–8.

²³ Metz Epitome 101–2, 110, 112. Note (suggestively, but admittedly inconclusively) the allusion made by the ghost of Philip II to his son’s “so many marriages” in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, 397 (a case, of course, of the pot calling the kettle black).

²⁴ See Greenwalt 1989; Ogden 1999: ix–xix (for the suppression of polygamy in the scholarship of ancient Macedon), 3–51 (for detailed discussion of the phenomenon); and Carney 2000b: passim, the culmination of her many careful articles on the women of the Macedonian dynasty.

²⁵ Satyrus F21 Kumaniecki at Ath. 557b–e. Note also Plu. Comp. Demetr. Ant. 4. See Ogden 1999: xv, 17–20.

²⁶ See Ogden 1999: ix–xxi.

²⁷ Brosius 1996: esp. 35–7.

²⁸ Curt. 3.13.12–14 and Just. 11.10.2; Brosius 1996: 87–8; Ogden 1999: 42; Carney 2003b: 244–5.

²⁹ Renard and Servais 1955: 33; Lane Fox 1973: 317, 535; Bosworth 1980b: 11; Ogden 1999: 44.

³⁰ Lane Fox 1973: 474; Brosius 1996: 176–9; Ogden 1999: 44–5; Carney 2000b: 108.

³¹ This is made much of by Tarn ii. 322–6.

³² Ath. 435a, incorporating Hieronymus of Rhodes F38 Wehrli and Theophrastus F578 Fortenbaugh. I hope to publish a more detailed treatment of this fascinating text soon.

³³ Plu. Alex. 21; cf. Curt. 5.6.8, 10.5.32. Curt. 6.5.32 tells us that Alexander was rather less ardent than the Amazon queen Thalestris, with whom he agreed to mate. Alexander’s sexual restraint was more often commented on in the context of dealings with boys, however: see Plu. Mor. 338d;Alex. 22; Ath. 603b (incorporating Dicaearchus F23 Wehrli and a fragment of Carystius’ Historika Hypomnemata).

³⁴ Just. 11.2.3.

³⁵ A miscarriage could, I suppose, have been attributed to some sort of deficiency in virility on the father’s part.

³⁶ See Ogden 1999: 42; Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 89–90.

³⁷ Ath. 576de (including Cleitarchus, FGrH 137 F11); Plu. Alex. 38; D.S. 17.72; and Curt. 5.7.2–11; Berve, no. 359; Peremans and Van’t Dack 1950–81: no. 14723; Lane Fox 1973: 262–4, 529; and Ogden 1999: index s.v. There is no mention of Thais’ involvement in the burning of the palace at Arr. 3.18.11. If her role in it had been a historical one, then it is possible that Ptolemy passed over it in silence in the history of which Arrian made so much use.

³⁸ Ath. 435a, incorporating Hieronymus of Rhodes F38 Wehrli and Theophrastus F578 Fortenbaugh.

³⁹ Cf., again, Lucian Herodotus or Aetion.

⁴⁰ Ael. VH 12.34; cf. Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 89 (where the reference is given incorrectly as 7.34).

⁴¹ We find a version of this same story also at Plin. HN 35.86, where the concubine’s name is given rather as Campaspe. Here we are not explicitly told that Campaspe was Alexander’s first love, but we are told that she was his favorite. In an act of magnanimity, Alexander handed her over to Apelles.

⁴² Plu. Alex. 46 cites many writers on both sides of the debate, including Cleitarchus, FGrH 137 F16; Ptolemy, FGrH 138 F28; and Aristobulus, FGrH 139 F21. See also D.S. 17.77.1–3 (from whom the quote; he is the earliest preserved writer to name the queen Thallestris); Curt. 6.5.24–32; Just. 12.3.5–7 (additionally supplying the alternative name Minythyia). Arr. 7.13.2–3 soberly alludes to, but denies (because omitted by Ptolemy and Aristobulus), accounts according to which Atropates, the satrap of Media, produced 300 Amazon women for Alexander in 324. See Hamilton 1969 on §46 and Brunt 1976–83: app. 21.

⁴³ Just. 12.7.9–11. Orosius 3.19.1 also has Cleophis sleeping with Alexander (concubitu regnum redemit), but Curt. 8.10.35 gives no indication of this or that her son was his. See also Berve, no. 435. For Bazira, see Arr. 4.27–8.

⁴⁴ See Yardley and Develin 1994: 115, and, for Augustan propaganda against Cleopatra, Propertius 3.11.39; Plin. HN 9.119.

⁴⁵ Arr. 1.23.8; however, Carney 2003b: 248–9 treats the Ada episode as historical.

⁴⁶ Ps.-Callisthenes, Alexander Romance 3.18, possibly a dim reflection of Alexander’s rather different encounter with Ada of Alinda, as narrated at Arr. 1.23.8.

⁴⁷ E.g., Hdt. 4.113; D.S. 3.53; Str. C504.

⁴⁸ Lys. 2.4; Isoc. 4.24, 68–70; D.S. 2.45–6, 3.52, 4.16; Just. 2.4.

⁴⁹ See above n. 42. Hamilton 1969 on §46 sees the origin of the Alexander–Amazon tale in the Scythian king’s offer of a daughter to Alexander (Arr. 4.15.1; Curt. 8.1.9–10).

⁵⁰ See Ogden 1996b: 182–6 for a more detailed justification of the views expressed here, and the principal literary ancient references to Amazons beyond those associated with Alexander. See now also Blok 1997.

⁵¹ Excipinus will be treated below. The case for Hector (Berve, no. 295) depends on Curt. 4.8.7–9. Here we are told that this lad was in the very flower of his youth (pederastic phraseology) and particularly dear to Alexander (eximio aetatis flore, in paucis Alexandro carus), and that when he drowned Alexander was deeply upset and gave him a magnificent funeral, seemingly anticipating that given to Hephaestion. This, I take it, is the evidence that leads Hammond 1981: 265 to posit an affair between the two. Jul.EP. 59 implies that Alexander was in some way responsible for Hector’s death.

⁵² For Hephaestion, see Berve, no. 357; Heckel 1992: 65–90; Reames-Zimmerman 1999.

⁵³ I hope to deal with the complexities of this text in further study.

⁵⁴ For this text see Stadter 1980: 26–7; Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 90.

⁵⁵ Arrian’s Dissertationes [sc. Epicteteae] ab Arriano digestae 2.22.17–18. The reference is wrongly given (for all that it is critical to her piece) at Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 90 (as 2.12.17–18).

⁵⁶ Arr. 7.14.5.

⁵⁷ Just. 12.12.11.

⁵⁸ Curt. 7.9.19. Among the MSS, C offers excipinon, P escipinon. Hedicke suggested Euxenippus, and is followed by, e.g., the Loeb (Rolfe 1946) and Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 91. The difficulties of the reading or construing of the name hardly militate against the man’s existence, pace Tarn ii. 321. Cf. Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 91–2.

⁵⁹ I list the other texts that imply a sexual relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion:

·                  In the spurious and undated, but no doubt late, Letters of Diogenes, we find a brief note addressed to Alexander: “If you want to become a respectable man, throw off the bit of string you have on your head and come to me. But there is no way you can, for you are controlled by Hephaestion’s thighs” (Diogenis Sinopensis Epistulae 24.1 Hercher). This is ostensibly a homoerotic reference (as noted by Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 90–1, who, however, seems to be unaware of the spurious nature of this text).

·                  D.S. 17.114.1–2 tells that Alexander honored Hephaestion in life most of all his friends, even though Craterus had a love to rival Hephaestion’s. Alexander is said to have described Craterus as merely “king-loving,” whereas Hephaestion was “Alexander-loving.”

·                  At Lucian Dialogues of the Dead 397 Philip makes a scornful praeteritio of Alexander’s errors, as we have seen, “making so many marriages and loving Hephaestion to excess.” The word  does not necessarily entail sexual love in itself. While it may be thought that sexual love must be referred to here for the criticism to have any force, the criticism could perhaps relate merely to the excessive mourning for Hephaestion. I am baffled by Reames-Zimmerman’s reference (1999: 92), to this homily as “typically Stoic.” Lucian was an agnostic philosopher, with preferences – literary preferences, at any rate – for Epicureanism and Cynicism.

These texts, taken together, amount to a good circumstantial case that a strand at any rate of the ancient traditions regarded Hephaestion as Alexander’s , in the familiar fashion of Classical Athenian-style Greek pederasty, which was structured, inter alia,by an age difference between the lover and the beloved. For the notion that these traditions may have begun during Hephaestion’s lifetime, in the malicious gossip of his rivals, see Heckel 1992: 84. It is a great pity to have lost Ephippus of Olynthus’ pamphlet “On the Death of Alexander and of Hephaestion,” FGrH 126, for which see Pearson 1960: 61–8 and Heckel 1992: 87.

⁶⁰ Arist. Pol. 1311b8–35.

⁶¹ Arist. Pol. 1311b4.

⁶² D.S. 16.93–4. Philip also supposedly made an  of Olympias’ brother Alexander of Epirus, according to Just. 8.6.4–8. Philip had himself been the eromenos of the Pammenes during his hostage-ship in Thebes: Suda s.v. ; cf. Philip’s supposed supportive remarks about the homosexual activities of the Theban Sacred Band after Chaeroneia at Plu. Pel. 18.

⁶³ Ogden 1996b: 111–19 (the military context homosexuality at Sparta and Thebes), 120–1 (the Macedonian Royal Pages), and 121–3 (Alexander). For homosexuality in the Macedonian court, see now also now Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 87–8, and Mortensen (forthcoming).

⁶⁴ Curt. 3.12.16–17: cum ipso pariter eductus. See also Alexander Romance 1.18 and Julius Valerius, Res Gestae Alexandri Magni 1.10. See Berve ii. 169 and Heckel 1992: 66–8; pace Tarn ii. 57 and Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 91.

⁶⁵ Arr. 4.13.3; cf. also Plu. Alex. 55 and Curt. 8.6–8.

⁶⁶ Arr. 4.13.7. See Berve, no. 824 and Ogden 1996b: 121 for his status as a Page; caution from Reames-Zimmerman 1999: 88.

⁶⁷ Theopompus, FGrH 115 F225a, at Plb. 8.9.9–12.

⁶⁸ Even so we hear rather more than either Tarn ii. 320 (although he subsequently contradicts himself) and Stoneman 1997: 52 allow. The references are collected at Berve, nos. 194 and 195.

The uncertain testimony is that of Arrian (Indica 18.8), which discusses the appointments Alexander makes for his fleet on the banks of the Hydaspes. A protracted list is given, among which is the brief notice: “And indeed he even had a Persian as a trierarch, Bagoas, son of Pharnouches.” It is not clear whether this Bagoas is to be identified with Alexander’s eunuch friend, whose patronymic we are not otherwise given (for the contention that we are dealing with two different Bagoases here, see Berve, nos. 194, 195, 768; Tarn ii. 322). Bagoas was in any case a common (Hellenized version of a) Persian name, one commonly, but not exclusively, attached to eunuchs (For other eunuch Bagoases, see Plin. HN 13.41; Ov. Am. 2.2.1; cf., more generally, Badian 1958b: 144.) But what gives most pause for thought is the consideration that Arrian draws attention to the fact that Bagoas was given a command even though he was a Persian, and not even though he was a eunuch, which might have been considered a greater object of note, a greater obstacle to military command, and indeed to subsume the quality of “Persianness.” Berve, no. 768 insisted on distinguishing the two, but on the spurious grounds that the eunuch Bagoas could not have used such a patronymic as deriving from the slave class (not obviously true of Persian society), and that the trierarch ought to have been older than the eunuch. But we know nothing of the eunuch’s age: Curtius’ reference (6.5.22–3) to his pueritia may as much address the undeveloped nature of his body or indeed his role as eromenos as it does any actual age. Nor is it clear that the Pharnouches identified as the father of Bagoas the trierarch is to be identified with the Lycian Pharnouches, whom one would have expected to have been Persian.

A relatively uninformative testimony is a fragment of Eumenes of Cardia preserved by Aelian, which tells us that Alexander had dinner with Bagoas on the 27th of the Macedonian month of Dios at his house, which was ten stades distant from his palace (Ael.VH 3.23, incorporating Eumenes of Cardia, FGrH 117 F2a). But the importance of this text is that it tells us that a source particularly close to Alexander vouched for the reality of Bagoas. For this reason Tarn ii. 322 n. 3 contended that this referred to another Bagoas. It appears from the organization of the index at Hammond 1981: 343 that Hammond identifies this Bagoas with the Lycian trierarch, and distinguishes him from the eunuch.

⁶⁹ See Tarn ii. 322; Badian 1958: 151.

⁷⁰ The palace will have been at Pura, but Plutarch may have mistakenly transposed Gedrosia and Carmania: see Tarn ii. 322; Badian 1958: 151–2.

⁷¹ Hammond 1981: 322 sweetly observes that “to kiss an actor even twice was no more a homosexual act than it would be in acting circles today”(!).

⁷² Tarn ii. 93 contended that the figure of Bagoas was invented out of nothing by Dicaearchus, to be elaborated by Curtius.

⁷³ For discussion of this passage, see Tarn ii. 320, stiffened by Badian 1958: 145.

⁷⁴ McKechnie 1999 concludes that the fictive element in this book of Curtius is high.

⁷⁵ I find the Rolfe 1946 Loeb translation here implausible: “it was not the custom of the Persians to mate with males who made females of themselves by prostitution.” This seems to depend upon construing ducere in a sense extrapolated from ducere uxorem,“marry.”

⁷⁶ Discussion at Tarn ii. 321, importantly modified by Badian 1958: 147–50.

⁷⁷ Tarn ii. 98, 319, 321 makes much of the fact that in Curtius’ narrative the Bagoas figure serves to highlight Alexander’s increasing decadence: the point is a good one, whatever the shortcomings of Tarn’s general approach to the traditions of Alexander’s homosexuality. See also Hammond 1981: 322.

⁷⁸ Plu. Mor. 65d, How to distinguish a flatter from a friend.

⁷⁹ See, more generally, Curt. 10.5.26–36 and Arr. 7.28–30.

⁸⁰ Aeschin. 1 (Against Timarchus); see also Dover 1978: passim and Fisher 2001.

⁸¹ For the effeminacy of the adulterer, see, e.g., Hom. Il. 6.321–2, 503–14 (Paris); A. A. 1633–5, 1643–5 (Aegisthus); see Dover 1978: 106 for the effeminate representation of adulterers on vases.

⁸² Buffière 1980: 30–4 treats the practice, in Greek context, as a variation of pederasty.