#The Persian Boy

[nvd94]

‘You must tell me when I say the Persian wrongly. Don’t be afraid to correct me, or I shall never learn.’

I said I had thought he would never love me. I did not beg him to take me with him wherever he was going; I did not think so far. I was like a traveler in the desert,who comes to water.

The persian Boy- Mary Renault

[dandelionfool]

doodling al'skander when i should be sleeping because i have not recovered from the effects of the persian boy

[i-shall-not-show-mercy]

Alexander: I should dress the part now that I rule Persia.

Bagoas: yeah! Plus it's cold... you should wear pants. You'd be warmer than in chitons.

Alexander: OVER MY DEAD BODY! Pants are great on you btw. But on me? NEVER!

[aniitahhhah]

People need to talk more about this book i love it

we need a bigger fandom!!

sorry for my bad drawings its the best i could do at 12 am😭🙏

[ghostwithwings]

Alexander marrying and making his homies to marry too so that Hephaestion's children and his own can play together.

[llitchilitchi]

having read through the persian boy, I can't get over how absolutely batshit unhinged both Roxana and Bagoas were in the novel, and the contrast of that to Hephaistion's relative calm, the only sane person among Alexander's lovers. and then I remembered fire from heaven and how Hephaistion nearly crushed Alexander to death out of cuteness aggression

[mademoiselle-red]

And now that I’m thinking about Hephaestion and the first two books of Renault’s Alexander Trilogy, it really hit me in the face how despite Renault’s best efforts to paint him as the long-suffering spouse in a sexless marriage, this man’s life is not a tragedy. He befriended a prince as a teenager and ended up 1) rich beyond his wildest dreams 2) the second most powerful man in the largest empire in the (known) world, 3) officially royalty by marriage to the sister of the king’s wife, and 4) dearly loved and trusted by Alexander above all others, all his life. Like, this man died young (and in an utterly idiotic and painful way), but he’s had a good run!!!

[ihavedonenothingright]

Working on a side-by-side comparison of The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller) and The Persian Boy (Mary Renault) because I hold that a large volume of the issues in TSOA's characterization of Patroclus come directly from Miller's attempts to make him a similar viewpoint character to Bagoas, and therefore, cast Achilles in a similar light to Renault's Alexander. I will note that Miller has not yet (to my knowledge) named The Alexander Trilogy specifically as an inspiration for The Song of Achilles, but she has named Renault as an inspiration, as well as a few other books of hers, so I think the likelihood is high she was referencing it. It's fairly obvious to me that the first line of The Song of Achilles is in the same vein as the first line of The Persian Boy, and I suspect that is intentional; both as a form of homage to the structure of epic poetry, and as a means of emphasizing the importance familial ties will play in the text.

"My father was a king and the son of kings" vs. "Lest anyone should suppose I am a son of nobody..."

Miller's Patroclus is not beat-for-beat Renault's Bagoas, but I do believe he's inspired by and designed to almost contrast with him. Bagoas identifies deeply with his lineage and his father, who were taken from him early, while Patroclus does not identify with his lineage and was rejected by his father. Bagoas wants to be a man by the terms of his society, but is prevented from doing so, while Patroclus rejects most of his culture's aspects of manhood, and the one time he meets them he is killed. It's important, however, that both of them are noncombatants (by choice or no) because it positions them away from the acts of killing, rape, and destruction their Special Blond Guys are doing, thereby making the blondies more likable. But while Bagoas's position as a noncombatant is rooted in history, Patroclus's is a notable departure from his position in The Iliad.

I'll go more in depth on all of this once I have the time, but if you haven't read any of Renault's works, I highly recommend them. Prepare yourself for a... flawed portrayal of Persia though.

[telltaleangelina]

"I would whisper to some shadow made of moonlight, "Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live." It was true, at least, that youth cannot live without hope."

-- The Persian Boy, Mary Renault

[nvd94]

The Persian boy sketches 🪷

[benedictusantonius]

[2023|103] The Persian Boy (1972) written by Mary Renault

[jules-of-the-black-forest]

That's it. That's the book.

[aniitahhhah]

Alexander’s so stubborn😓

I love using excessive highlights they look so shinyy

(Yea idk whats going on with Alexanders legs either)

The more i look at it the more i wanna fix😭

[ghostwithwings]

Reading the Persian boy.

Ok but where is Hephaestion? I miss my new Patrochilles.

[llitchilitchi]

absolutely Adore the Bagoas-Alexander-Hephaistion love triangle in The Persian Boy because Bagoas's theatricity matches Alexander's while his absolute pathetic demeanor around him matches Hephaistion's freak, all while Alexander is absolutely Stupid about any and all of this, they're perfect for each other

[mademoiselle-red]

I’ve been thinking about how my favorite genre of fanfiction are works that seem to say to the original work, “great concept but I want to execute it differently.” I love how it takes the building blocks of the original work and show how the resulting story could have been arranged differently.

A sub-genre of that I absolutely adore are fanfics that are beautifully written, gentle, whimsical, or romantic in tone, but whose concepts, thematic and stylistic decisions are explicitly hostile and antagonistic to those in the original work. There is something so enticing about the gentle violence of a Draco/Harry fic that turns some of values and choices of the original series upside-down.

I love the way this played out in the fandom for the Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault. The second book in the trilogy, The Persian Boy is itself a “transformative” work that offers an alternate interpretation of the history and cultural myth(s) of Alexander the Great. It imagines a romantic relationship between Alexander and the eunuch Bagoas, his only male lover recorded in official histories. The story centers this relationship while sidelining the much more heavily mythologized and romanticized relationship between Alexander and the general Hephaestion, his friend / right-hand-man / maybe-lover . Historians from antiquity record in extravagant detail Alexander’s deep emotional attachment to Hephaestion, but nothing about sexual love was ever written in the official histories. By making its protagonist Bagoas, The Persian Boy centers the romance around the explicitly queer relationship over the maybe-queer relationship historians liked to call “platonic”. The novel does depict Alexander and Hephaestion in a sexless marriage-like kind of romantic love, but does not make it the focus of the story. The focus of the romance is between Alexander and Bagoas. I think the novel is very successful in selling this romance and challenging the Alexander / Hephaestion mythos. But it is apparent that the fan favorite couple, even in this fandom, is still Alexander/Hephaestion. And most of these fan works write back against The Persian Boy’s narrative decision to de-center Hephaestion by re-centering Alexander/Hephaestion in their stories, drawing from both Renault’s work and the works of Roman historians, medieval poets, renaissance artists, and other contemporary novelists & historians. When reading and writing Alexander/Hephaestion fanfics, it sometimes feels to me like the mythos itself is writing back against Renault’s attempt at subversion with the might of millennia of storytelling and the fury of millennia of marginalization. On a meta fourth-wall-breaking level, Renault’s Bagoas had foreseen this: Hephaestion will always win, in both The Persian Boy and in the cultural consciousness of its fans. He had won long before Renault set pen to paper, on the day the historical Alexander, the Alexander of our world, immortalized their love through his elaborate displays of devotion and grief. The part of me that reads literature like a blood sport delights in the knowledge that in the collective cultural consciousness, Alexander will always love Hephaestion more.