#ernst badian

[jeannereames]

This was a fun ramble about what Alexander might have thought he was doing, especially after 330 BCE. It's (sort of) a summary of (some) things I said in my second chapter of the Cambridge Companion, but more streamlined.

[eosphoroz]

What do you call it when an academic paper makes you cry? 【   𝖘 𝖆 𝖉   𝖉 𝖆 𝖗 𝖐   𝖆 𝖈 𝖆 𝖉 𝖊 𝖒 𝖎 𝖆   】 (From ‘The Struggle for Personal Independence’ by Ernst Badian)

[jeannereames]

I see you talk a lot about historiography! What would you consider the most important development of Alexander’s historiography?

What the Hell is Historiography? (And why you should care)

This question and the next one in the queue are both going to be fun for me. 😊

First, some quick definitions for those who are new to me and/or new to reading history:

Historiography = “the history of the histories” (E.g., examination of the sources themselves rather than the subject of them…a topic that typically incites yawns among undergrads but really fires up the rest of us, ha.)

primary sources = the evidence itself—can be texts, art, records, or material evidence. For ancient history, this specifically means the evidence from the time being studied.

secondary sources = writings by historians using the primary evidence, whether meant for a “regular” audience (non-specialists) or academic discussions with citations, footnotes, and bibliography (sometimes referred to as “full scholarly apparatus”).

For ancient history, we also sometimes get a weird middle category…they’re not modern sources but also not from the time under discussion, might even be from centuries after the fact. Consider the medieval Byzantine “encyclopedia” called the Suda (sometimes Suidas), which contains information from now lost ancient sources, finalized c. 900s CE. To give a comparison, imagine some historian a thousand years from now studying Geoffry Chaucer from the 1300s, using an entry about him in some kid’s 1975 World Book Encyclopedia that contains information that had been lost by his day.

This middle category is especially important for Alexander, since even our primary sources all date hundreds of years after his death. Yes, those writers had access to contemporary accounts, but they didn’t just “cut-and-paste.” They editorialized and selected from an array of accounts. Worse, they rarely tell us who they used. FIVE surviving primary Alexander histories remain, but he’s mentioned in a wide (and I do mean wide) array of other surviving texts. Alas this represents maybe a quarter of what was actually written about him in antiquity.

OKAY, so …

The most important historiographic changes in Alexander studies!

I’m going to pick three, or really two-and-a-half, as the last is an extension of the second.

FIRST …decentering Arrian as the “good” source as opposed to the so-called “vulgate” of Diodoros-Curtius-Justin as “bad” sources.

Many earlier Alexander historians (with a few important exceptions [Fritz Schachermeyr]) considered Arrian to be trustworthy, Plutarch moderately trustworthy if short, and the rest varying degrees of junk. W. W. Tarn was especially guilty of this. The prevalence of his view over Schachermeyr’s more negative one owed to his popularity/ease of reading, and the fact he wrote on Alexander for volume 6 of the first edition (1927) of the Cambridge Ancient History, later republished in two volumes with additions (largely in vol. 2) in 1948 and 1956. Thus, and despite being a lawyer (barrister) not a professional historian, his view dominated Alexander studies in the first half of the 20th century (Burn, Rose, etc.)…and even after. Both Mary Renault and Robin Lane Fox (neither of whom were/are professional historians either), as well as N. G. L. Hammond (with qualifications), show Tarn’s more romantic impact well into the middle of the second half of the 20th century. But you could find it in high school and college textbooks into the 1980s.

The first really big shift (especially in English) came with a pair of articles in 1958 by Ernst Badian: “The Eunuch Bagoas,” Classical Quarterly 8, and “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Historia 7. Both demolished Tarn’s historiography. I’ve talked about especially the first before, but it really WAS that monumental, and ushered in a more source-critical approach to Alexander studies. This also happened to coincide with a shift to a more negative portrait of the conqueror in work from the aforementioned Schachermeyr (reissuing his earlier biography in 1973 as Alexander der Grosse: Das Problem seiner Persönlichtenkeit und seines Wirkens) to Peter Green’s original Alexander of Macedon from Praeger in 1970, reissued in 1991 from Univ. of California-Berkeley. J. R. Hamilton’s 1973 Alexander the Great wasn’t as hostile, but A. B. Bosworth’s 1988 Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great turned back towards a more negative, or at least ambivalent portrait, and his Alexander in the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (1996) was highly critical. I note the latter two, as Bosworth wrote the section on Alexander for the much-revised Cambridge Ancient History vol. 6, 1994, which really demonstrates how the narrative on Alexander had changed.

All this led to an unfortunate kick-back among Alexander fans who wanted their hero Alexander. They clung/still cling to Arrian (and Plutarch) as “good,” and the rest as varying degrees of bad. Some prefer Tarn’s view of the mighty conqueror/World unifier/Brotherhood-of-Mankind proponent, including that He Absolutely Could Not Have Been Queer. Conversely, others are all over the romance of him and Hephaistion, or Bagoas (often owing to Renault or Renault-via-Oliver Stone), but still like the squeaky-nice-chivalrous Alexander of Plutarch and Arrian.

They are very much still around. Quite a few of the former group freaked out over the recent Netflix thing, trotting out Plutarch (and Arrian) to Prove He Wasn’t Queer, and dismissing anything in, say, Curtius or Diodoros as “junk” history. But I also run into it on the other side, with those who get really caught up in all the romance and can’t stand the idea of a vicious Alexander.

It's not necessary to agree with Badian’s (or Green’s or Schachermeyr’s) highly negative Alexander to recognize the importance of looking at all the sources more carefully. Justin is unusually problematic, but each of the other four had a method, and a rationale. And weaknesses. Yes, even Arrian. Arrian clearly trusted Ptolemy to a degree Curtius didn’t. For both of them, it centered on the fact he was a king. I’m going to go with Curtius on this one, frankly.

Alexander is one of the most malleable famous figures in history. He’s portrayed more ways than you can shake a stick at—positive, negative, in-between—and used for political and moral messaging from even before his death in Babylon right up to modern Tik-Tok vids.

He might have been annoyed that Julius Caesar is better known than he is, in the West, but hands-down, he’s better known worldwide thanks to the Alexander Romance in its many permutations. And he, more than Caesar, gets replicated in other semi-mythical heroes. (Arthur, anybody?)

Alfred Heuss referred to him as a wineskin (or bottle)—schlauch, in German—into which subsequent generations poured their own ideas. (“Alexander  der  Große  und  die politische Ideologie  des Altertums,” Antike und Abendland 4, 1954.) If that might be overstating it a bit, he’s not wrong.

Who Alexander was thus depends heavily on who was (and is) writing about him.

And that’s why nuanced historiography with regard to the Alexander sources is so important. It’s also why there will never be a pop presentation that doesn’t infuriate at least a portion of his fanbase. That fanbase can’t agree on who he was because the sources that tell them about him couldn’t agree either.

SECOND …scholarship has moved away from an attempt to find the “real” Alexander towards understanding the stories inside our surviving histories and their themes. A biography of Alexander is next to impossible (although it doesn’t stop most of us from trying, ha). It’s more like a “search” for Alexander, and any decent history of his career will begin with the sources. And their problems.

This also extends to events. I find myself falling in the middle between some of my colleagues who genuinely believe we can get back to “what happened,” and those who sorta throw up their hands and settle on “what story the sources are telling us, and why.” Classic Libra. 😉

As frustrating as it may sound, I’m afraid “it depends” is the order of the day, or of the instance, at least. Some things are easier to get back to than others, and we must be ready to acknowledge that even things reported in several sources may not have happened at all. Or at least, were quite radically different from how it was later reported. (Thinking of proskynesis here.) Sometimes our sources are simply irreconcilable…and we should let them be. (Thinking of the Battle of Granikos here.)

THIRD/SECOND-AND-A-HALF …a growing awareness of just how much Roman-era attitudes overlay and muddy our sources, even those writing in Greek. It would be SO nice to have just one Hellenistic-era history. I’d even take Kleitarchos! But I’d love Marsyas, or Ptolemy. Why? Both were Macedonians. Even our surviving philhellenic authors such as Plutarch impose Greek readings and morals on Macedonian society.

So, let’s add Roman views on top of Greek views on top of Macedonian realities in a period of extremely fast mutation (Philip and Alexander both). What a muddle! In fact, one of the real advantages of a source such as Curtius is that his sources seem to have known a thing or three about both Achaemenid Persia and also Macedonian custom. He sometimes says something like, “Macedonian custom was….” We don’t know if he’s right, but it’s not something we find much in other histories—even Arrian who used Ptolemy. (Curtius may also have used Ptolemy, btw.)

In any case, as a result of more care given to the themes of the historians, a growing sensitivity to Roman milieu for all of them has altered our perceptions of our sources.

These are, to me, the major and most significant shifts in Alexander historiography from the late 1800s to the early 2100s.

[jeannereames]

Hi Jeanne I'm Elena of @alessandroiiidimacedonia

I'd like to know if there is a term that indicates all the literary production about Alexander the Great, of any genre fiction and non-fiction, poetry or not, which see it positively and also negatively, by ancient and modern authors, contemporaries and later.

Thank you,

Elena

Hi, Elena!

Ernst Badian dubbed us "Macedoniasts" some decades ago, ha.

I like that term, as it's inclusive of the study not just of ATG, but also of Philip, the kings before them, the Macedonian people and culture, and also of the Hellenistic era that followed.

So we (professional, semi-professional, or amateur) are all Macedoniasts.

Welcome to the club. ;)

[jeannereames]

What do you think about Bagoas? How do you see Hephaistion interacting with him after, or even if, he became Alexander's lover (eromenos)?

Did Bagoas Exist?

 With that provocative title, I want to consider the sometimes awkward interception of history and historical fiction. But first, a bit of historiography (history of history) with regard to Bagoas.

In 1956, Ernst Badian (Harvard) published an article that literally rocked the academic world in Alexander studies: “The Eunuch Bagoas” (Classical Quarterly 8.3-4: 144-57). Despite the title, it only glancingly addressed Bagoas himself, or Alexander’s sexuality. At root, it was about SOURCE CRITICISM. Badian challenged the long-held preference for Arrian (and Plutarch) over the so-called vulgate of Diodorus, Curtius, and Justin. Arrian was the “good” (trustworthy) historian, while the others varied in their degrees of unreliability, largely based on how hostile they were to Alexander. That oversimplifies, but it’s how Tarn, Burn, Fuller, and Wilcken—never mind Droysen himself—understood our five ancient biographers.

Badian’s article was a shot across the bow. A radical change followed in how Alexander was viewed, due to a change in how the sources were evaluated for truth. The New Crop of leading scholars included Badian, Bosworth, Green, and Schachermeyr, all of whom had a decidedly less positive perspective, because they paid more attention to Curtius, et al. I won’t go into, here, the impact that events such as WW II had on the views of these scholars (two of whom were German and one a German Jew), but it should be figured into the larger story.

In addition, by the late 1960s and ‘70s, Macedonia herself had become a topic of study, not just “Philip and Alexander,” thanks to Charles Edson and Harry Dell, fathers of modern Macedonian studies (“Macedoniasts,” to use Badian’s name). A look at the country that produced Alexander expanded our understanding of how to evaluate him in context.

That was the new buzzword: CONTEXT. Badian had unleashed the genie, and increasingly scholars studied the sources in the context of when and who was writing; they didn’t just take them at face value as some sort of abstract truth.

This is the same journey those who pursue independent study of Alexander must take. Anybody interested in Alexander who reads Arrian, Curtius, or Plutarch in toto (the three easiest to find in English until the recent release by Oxford of a Waterfield’s translation of Diodorus, or Yardley’s earlier translation of Justin) is already ahead of the game. Yet casual readings may not be contextually critical—e.g., with an awareness of WHEN the author wrote, and in WHAT historical circumstances, with all the contingent tropes and literary assumptions at play.

Keeping track of that can be daunting. But important. Modern readers should regard the ancient sources with the same skepticism they might bring to Fox News (or, if your politics differ, MSNBC). Bias was endemic.

What Badian’s article brought was a more critical analysis of the sources. He used Bagoas to get there, as the tendency at the time was to dismiss Bagoas because of rampant homophobia among white male historians in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Badian utterly demolished the historiography of Tarn. It was beautiful and, really, quite brutal.

Yet I want to underscore that Badian didn’t do it to highlight Alexander as Queer. He did it because he had serious issues with Tarn’s tendency to turn Alexander into a Proper Scottish Gentleman. Honestly, Badian’s views of homosexuality weren’t that different from Tarn’s, but he felt no need to “save” Alexander from potentially negative press. Ergo, he wasn’t bothered by the notion that Bagoas existed, and Alexander may have had a fling with him—just as Curtius reports.

We need to keep that in mind, too. For Badian, that Alexander could have taken Bagoas as a lover wasn’t Queer Positive. It was, at best, morally neutral. Attempts by earlier historians to dismiss Bagoas were directly tied to attempts to defend/rehabilitate Alexander—something not on Badian’s agenda.

Here’s where we get down to complicated—but important—brass tacks. Badian did not consider Alexander ethically compromised because of possible homoerotic interests. He considered him ethically compromised for his political and military choices. (Any serious reading of Badian’s bibliography reveals this, but consider his 1960 “the Death of Parmenio” TAPA 91: 324-38, wherein he theorizes that Alexander kept a CIA-style file on Paremenion.) Alexander’s sexual proclivities were pretty far down on Badian’s list, even if not necessarily a good thing.

For Badian, Alexander killed a lot of people, committed war crimes, and practiced causal murder in order to stay in power. That was far more important than who he took to bed.

Enter Mary Renault and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Historian. 😉

I’ll be frank; I have issues with Renault’s not-so-subtle misogyny in a number of her Greek historical novels. That may sound like a strange charge for a bi gal to level against another bi gal, but ‘We’ve come a long way, baby,’ and I’m not going to pussyfoot around Renault’s issues with women, even as I acknowledge they reflect her own era’s attitudes. I’m sure people in 50 years will pick out issues in my novels too, that I didn’t see at the time I wrote them.

Yet Renault read Badian’s article (because she was a smart cookie and did follow hella lot of academic publishing)…and her storyteller’s brain went somewhere else entirely.

Out walked the fictional hero of The Persian Boy.

One rule-of-thumb in historical fiction is not to write a novel from the point-of-view (POV) of a famous historical person. Renault ignored that in Fire from Heaven, perhaps as it followed the young Alexander before he went on to later fame. When she wrote an older, historic Alexander, she utilized the classic approach: centering the POV on an unknown or marginally known historical person who “enters” the world of the story, and is thus able to relate it to the reader (also an outsider). When writing wholly WITHIN a world, it creates real problems. I had to figure out how to get around them in Dancing with the Lion. But that’s a post for another day.

In The Persian Boy, Renault’s use of Bagoas is the classic POV approach for historical fiction.

And then this WEIRD THING happened.

Renault’s fictional Bagoas took on a life of his own, quite apart from historical record.

First, not long after publication of The Persian Boy (1972), Renault released a biography, The Nature of Alexander (1975) that attempted to position her not “merely” as a novelist, but as an educated amateur historian in her own right, citing original sources (which, yes, she could read in Greek). If sometimes overly credulous of the sources, her biography is less problematic than professional historians sometimes like to cast it, which owes, I think, to historians’ general suspicion of historical novelists, as addressed in Sarah Pinto’s “Emotional histories and historical emotions” (Rethinking History 14.2, 2010: 189-207).

In any case, in it, she advances her argument for why she believes Bagoas existed, citing, among other things, Badian. It’s not a bad argument, in part because she doesn’t try to push it too far. She admits to creating a fictional character based on the probable existence of this shadowy figure at Alexander’s court, who (as did Badian) she contends existed. Unlike Badian, she divorces his existence from any evaluation of Alexander’s morality, which (like Tarn) she considers far more elevated than Badian.

So we have a quite curious transition:

Tarn/et al.: Alexander as Philosopher in Armor/Bringer of Western Civilization to the Benighted Barbarian East, who Absolutely Must Not Exhibit any Homosexual (=pathic) Proclivities.

Badian: Alexander was an opportunistic megalomaniac with no moral compass, so Curtius’s account of his same-sex affairs are likely true, but were the least of his ethical issues.

Renault: Alexander was a philosopher in armor like Tarn suggested, but Badain proved Bagoas existed and Tarn was a homophobe, so Alexander’s relationship with Bagoas should be given credence. But Alexander Is Still Good!

Second, The Persian Boy and Fire from Heaven became cult classics in the gay community, as Renault Dared to Go There, however allusively.

Bagoas emerged from The Persian Boy, clothed in Renault’s Coat of Many (Rainbow) Colors, transitioning from a fictional character used to open Alexander’s world to the unfamiliar reader, into a Real Person. This was more than, “Yeah, there may have been a eunuch at Alexander’s court who the king had a fling with, but we don’t know much besides his name.” He became a 3D, enfleshed character who many believe was as Renault wrote him.

It’s really quite remarkable, when you think about it. Renault “invented” Bagoas. As least as he’s popularly presented today. How many authors can claim that? It’s akin to the life that Harry Pottery took on outside Rowling’s world, or Spock outside Roddenberry’s.

For example, Jo Graham stated that the opening lines of her 2010 Stealing Fire literally takes up from the last lines of The Persian Boy. And Bagoas in Oliver Stone’s Alexander owes entirely to Renault, as do several other scenes—literary steals that he never acknowledges, which I find reprehensible. He’s lucky her estate didn’t bother suing him. (Although one can’t copyright plot.)

The power of Bagoas in Alexander reception has been discussed in a chapter for Brill’s Reception of Alexander the Great, “The Unmanly Ruler,” 2018, written by Liz Baynam and Terry Ryan. They have their own take on the matter.

In any case, Stone’s “Alexander” catapulted Bagoas back into popular consciousness for an entirely new generation, many of whom subsequently read Renault. Were she still alive, I wonder what she’d make of the fact her creation has put on skin and breathes? I dare say she’d be tickled pink.

But this brings us to the CRUX.

Dialing back a fictional character to historical reality.

In order to understand my own perspective, I needed to give the context for how we got to where we are, with Bagoas.

So what do I think?

If Badian made several absolutely critical points in his 1956 article, using Bagoas as the medium is, perhaps, ironic in retrospect, in light of much recent scholarship on Romanizing tendencies in the Alexander Histories. I’ve mentioned this trend before, and complained that in some respects, it seems to go too far. But in others, it’s spot-on.

With Bagoas we have a specific problem to unpack.

1 Did Bagoas exist, and historians such as Arrian try to rehabilitate Alexander by ignoring him? (NOT for modern homophobic reasons! For ancient reasons involving sophrosune and philosophical ideals.)

2 Or did Bagoas NOT exist, and Latin historians (esp. Curtius) invent him as part of a thematic scheme to show Alexander succumbing to Evil Eastern debaucheries … really a comment on the Roman Horror of the East, with Marc Antony (even if never emperor) set up as the Bogie Man by marrying that scary, awful Cleopatra.

3) Or maybe there was a eunuch Bagoas taken into Alexander’s house, like most of Darius’s other concubines/household, but Alexander never had any real interaction with him. Later Roman-era historians elevated his importance for the same reasons mentioned above. The degree to which Alexander made use of Darius’s harem is unclear, and depends on a source’s PROGRAM: to show him as self-restrained (sophrosune) or succumbing to “eastern ways” (= bad).

SO….what does any of that MEAN?

There are loads of problems here to untangle. First, we must attempt to separate (if we can) the programmatic “message” each of the ancient sources is trying to espouse… messages not only different from modern ones, but often offensive to modern ideas.

Then we must NOT react by going the other way, tempting as that may be. I’d suggest Renault fell victim to the temptation, although as a novelist, Bagoas really did offer her a valuable tool. I have issues with The Persian Boy as a novel, but not because she used Bagoas.

Nonetheless, we MUST resist the attempt to push back against Greco-Roman tendencies to demonize the East by buying into Tarn’s “Brotherhood of Mankind” nonsense, which Renault did, and Stone, too. E.g., that Alexander was an early proponent of multiculturalism.

Newsflash. He wasn’t, even while I also don’t think he was as parochial as some of his soldiers. But this is not a Right vs. Left view. Unfortunately, and tragically, I think Alexander became more conservative as he aged, and increasingly disillusioned. If you look at what he DOES (not what he says in speeches that were inventions of later authors, e.g., at Opis), his later appointments are MACEDONIANS. He left only about four Persians in power. Apparently, he’d come to distrust them. Not a pretty picture, eh? Then again, he’d invaded and trashed their country. Can’t imagine why they might not have been his Biggest Fans... (For the argument regarding his appointments, see A. B. Bosworth, 1980. ‘Alexander and the Iranians,’ Journal ofHellenic Studies 100, 1-21.)

All this brings us back to Bagoas.

We need to back up and consider what we know of Greek sexual mores at the time. Greeks did not make eunuchs. In fact, they looked down on ALL bodily modification, from tattoos to pierced ears to circumcision. The ONLY “mars” on a man’s body should be scars…and on the front! (Any on the back implied they were taken while running away, or whipping as a slave.)

Furthermore, this was a deeply misogynistic world where one’s manhood was closely guarded and elevated, and NEVER to be surrendered. Anal sex was permissible only among young boys before they had a proper (male) beard. A man who “made himself like a woman” (accepting anal sex or adopting feminine behaviors) was an object of great ridicule.

Eunuchs would, therefore, have been regarded as, at best, sad, and at worst, gross. They might have been acceptable as slaves for male prostitution, but Greeks would not make them nor utilize them in households. They tended to find the practice disgusting, at least in the Classical era—and that is Alexander’s upbringing. He opened the Hellensitic world, but wasn’t a part of it.

Having a Greek (or Macedonian) male form a serious emotional attachment to a eunuch is, therefore, deeply problematic.

Renault knew that. But she also believed in a modified version of Tarn’s “Brotherhood” theory. She writes Alexander as able to get past those deep-seated Greek biases. I’m far more skeptical. Tarn has been repeatedly debunked, and if I do think Alexander was fascinated by and open to the lands through which he traveled, this shouldn’t be pushed too far. As noted above, his later appointments undercut theories of some Alexandrine multiculturalism. While I think he was an “approach” personality (e.g., he found difference interesting, not automatically scary and weird), we each have limits beyond which we find it difficult to go as a result of the culture in which we were raised.

So what do I think about Bagoas?

I think he existed, but his role at Alexander’s court is far from clear. Much of Curtius’s (and later) accounts of him are meant to undercut Alexander’s JUDGMENT. For instance, Bagoas’s accusations get certain high-ranking officers killed. Ergo, Alexander is succumbing to Oriental Corruption by (horrors!) believing a eunuch’s account. In her biography, Renault attempts to address these realistically, but that’s part of her tendency to take the sources at face value and grant them too much.

So ironically, while Badian’s “The Eunuch Bagoas” got us to seriously reconsider the sources IN context, that very consideration has led me to doubt Bagoas as a figure of any real import.

For those hoping Bagoas will have a significant future role in Dancing with the Lion, I’m sorry to disappoint. My own view is that Alexander would have been kind to him, the same as he was to most who fell under his authority. But Alexander’s own cultural biases would have prevented him from taking a significant interest in a eunuch besides his functional role at court, or possibly as a passing sexual partner. That doesn’t necessarily paint Alexander as enlightened, but I view him as culturally embedded on this matter.

Yet the prominence that Renault’s Bagoas has gained in the modern imagination is a testament to the power of narrative that fits the needs of our current world, which is not at all the same as their world. And THAT is what makes historical fiction different from history.

[jeannereames]

Alexander as LGBTQI Icon

(The last blog-tour repost for my novels, Dancing with the Lion.)

“Was Alexander the Great gay?”

I get that question ALL the time. The poor horse has been beaten to death, and discussion always ends in an examination of Greek terminology that’s largely academic. I’ve written about it before elsewhere.

I’d like to look at this from a different angle, here.

For decades (maybe centuries), Alexander has been an icon in the queer community. That upsets a portion of his fanbase, including some Greeks. When early publicity for Oliver Stone’s 2004 blockbuster hinted that Alexander had male lovers, a group of Greek lawyers threatened to sue him. Yet as in the rest of Europe, the younger generation cares less, and in 2015, Greece passed recognition of same-sex civil unions, even if they couldn’t quite make the leap to call it “marriage.” As a result, resistance to Alexander as gay, or at least bisexual, has lessened in Greece. Somewhat.

In the rest of the Western world, “Was Alexander gay?” has shifted for many to “Alexander was gay.” Question to statement.

How’d we get here? Indulge me in a tour of Alexander’s treatment in modern history and recent fiction. I’ll keep it as brief as possible, but stay for the payoff, ‘kay?

The earliest modern historians of Alexander (late 1800s) wouldn’t even talk about Alexander and men. Then, in the 1930s, W. W. Tarn wrote a “defense” of him from those naughty insinuations in his 2-book biography. It wasn’t very convincing unless you were inclined to be convinced. After, either silence or righteous indignation were the usual responses to the matter, and historians routinely ignored Hephaistion (his probable lover) in their work because it might bring up the homosexual thing.

Then, in 1958, Ernst Badian published, “The Eunuch Bagoas” in The Classical Quarterly, and the ground shook. Yes, his article influenced Mary Renault’s later Persian Boy, but it wasn’t a manifesto on Alexander’s same-sex partners. Badian sought to rehabilitate the ancient sources that Tarn had dismissed because they’d suggested that Bagoas was, you know, REAL. Hence the article title.

After, scholarship began to talk about Alexander and men. Yet a certain discomfort remained. Most ATG (Alexander the Great) historians of the time were cis straight white guys. If many (some of whom I know personally, so can vouch for) were also left-leaning agnostic/atheist liberals, people are products of their era. They might acknowledge that Alexander had male lovers, but thinking too closely about it was outside their comfort zone.*

In addition, this new generation coincided with the “Badian Revision” that attacked Alexander’s image as Romantic Hero or Gentleman Conqueror—fairly, to be honest. He committed some horrific acts. In any case, the then-current trend painted him (and his friends and supporters, including Hephaistion) with a hostile brush, independent of sexual orientation.

Well, maybe. Of them all, Hephaistion faired worst, and a lot of that assessment was colored by his emotional role in Alexander’s life.

About the same time, Mary Renault (herself bisexual) published Fire from Heaven (1969). We might characterize it as a toe in the water; she’s allusive about Alexander and Hephaistion there. But in 1972, she followed it with The Persian Boy, and threw down the damn gauntlet.

Oh, what a difference a riot can make! Hello, Stonewall.

I’ve noticed a tendency among some younger LGBTQI readers to pooh-pooh Renault for her “off the page” takes on Alexander and sex, or for her idealizing of Alexander, and I agree about the idealizing. But we must place her in her proper historical context. At the time, she was a lightning strike. Whatever I may think of her romanticism, I recognize her enormous impact, and salute her. You go, Grrrrl.

I collect ATG fiction for snorts and giggles, have for a long time. But with a couple exceptions where I was asked to review something, I’ve avoided reading any since 1998, in case it even accidentally influenced my own work. After Dancing with the Lion sold, however, I finally read what I hadn’t, then presented conclusions for an academic paper on Alexander and Hephaistion in fiction post-Stonewall (coinciding with the 50th Anniversary of the riot), presented at Emory in Atlanta for the 2019 annual meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians. I won’t detail the books I covered, but will share the PATTERNS I saw, and let you. Gentle Reader, draw conclusions. (This paper has now been enlarged on and published as "Alexander the Great and Hephaistion in Fiction after Stonewall," The Routledge Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, K.R. Moore, ed., 2022.)

First, and most importantly, all but one novel presented Alexander and Hephaistion as lovers. If the presentations weren’t universally positive, it marked a sharp break with pre-Stonewall books.

In every novel wherein Alexander and Hephaistion’s love affair was positively portrayed, Hephaistion was also presented positively. Alexander may or may not have been. In every novel wherein Alexander and Hephaistion’s relationship (and homoeroticism) was negativized, Hephaistion was also negativized, and usually Alexander as well.

Yet several novels ticked “neither of the above.” In some, the relationship was problematized, usually for plot reasons; in others, the author sent mixed messages about homoeroticism (I think accidentally). Curiously, in most of these, Hephaistion was presented positively while Alexander was not. Finally, in the single novel where they were not lovers, Hephaistion was positive, but Greek homoerotic activity was ignored.

Take-away: authors who portray the relationship positively, have a positive Hephaistion. Authors who show it negatively make Hephaistion (and Alexander) morally iffy, at best. Otherwise, it’s a crap-shoot.

Here’s the kicker (and I bet you can guess what’s coming): the positive portrayals were all by women, plus one (British-Lebanese) man. Neutral portrayals might be a mixed bag, gender-wise. The negative ones? All guys. And the one where they weren’t lovers? A guy.

That, to me, sends a powerful message about who’s comfortable with the idea, regardless of whether an author publicly supports LGBTQI rights. Several of the negative ones were published before 2000, but others were recent-ish.

If the queer civil rights movement has made great strides in the 21st century, we’re experiencing a predictable cultural backlash. And in the current environment, I think it hugely important not just for LGBTQI people generally, but especially LGBTQI youth to be able to look at history and say, “Hey! Alexander the Great loved a man, and look what he accomplished!” I won’t go into, here, whether Alexander was “gay,” “bi,” or if we should even use modern terms; I’ll be happy to do that elsewhere over a beer.

Here, I want to say that, YES, dammit, it’s not only okay, but important for the LGBTQI community to claim Alexander. The fact the person he loved best in the world was another guy could keep some queer kid from suicide or self-harm, or even just give her/him/them a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

----------------------------------------------------------------- *This has changed substantially in the past 20 years and it’s now inaccurate to assume ATG scholars are mostly male, white, or straight. At the last International Alexander Symposium (2018, Edmonton, AB), hosted by Frances Pownall, a substantial number of women scholars presented, at least a third. Furthermore, Frances is, together with Sabine Műller and Sulochana Asirvatham editing the proceeds: a 3-woman editorial team. Frances is also editing a festschrift for Elizabeth Carney (one of the most prominent female scholars on Alexander, Macedonia, and the Successors) along with two others, another of whom is female. And of course, Sulo is not only not male, she’s not white. This is the new face of Macedonian scholarship.