Let’s talk about how "fanfiction begets fanfiction" because the wholesale acceptance of the Bagoas myth as gospel is infuriating. Curtius Rufus started it to serve his own agenda. He wasn't writing an objective biography on Alexander; he was constructing a heavy handed Roman lecture on how wealth and absolute power cause moral decay. To fabricate this dramatic arc of Alexander being corrupted by foreign luxury, Curtius took a single public theater kiss and inflated it into a massive, conveniently made up romance.
To make this fake relationship look as toxic and decadent as possible, Curtius relied on the standard of literary doubling and Roman topoi of Eastern cultural stereotypes. He didn't just write about a dancer. Instead, he used those popular literary tools and took the sinister reputation of the other famous Persian eunuch named Bagoas, the notorious, king-making grand vizier who poisoned multiple rulers a generation earlier, and projected that dark, manipulative archetype onto a teenage dancer to invent a corrupting, all-consuming love affair. Then Mary Renault blindly reused that moralizing propaganda, wrote a fictional book in 1972, and modern pop culture swallowed the romance whole.
It is deeply annoying how this fake relationship has infected everything when the actual primary sources completely reject it. Plutarch records the theater kiss strictly as a performative crowd pleaser to boost troop morale after a literal death march, and then never mentions him again. Arrian, using the firsthand diaries of Ptolemy, completely ignores him. Diodorus Siculus and Justin are totally silent. If this teenage dancer was actually the emotional center of Alexander’s life, the contemporary sources would have noticed.
The narrative cheapens the history and insults Alexander's intelligence. At the exact same time this fake romance is supposed to be happening, Alexander is elevating Hephaestion to second in command and arranging the Susa weddings so they can marry sisters and make their future kids first cousins. He was securing a dynasty with his actual partner, not throwing a wrench into his life's work for a convenient, fictionalized love affair. But please, let's keep treating a Roman smear campaign and Mary Renault's fanfiction like historical fact.