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jeannereames · 22 days ago

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Good day, Dr. Reames! I'd like to ask you if you think the relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion (as well as that between Achilles and Patroclus) generates so much debate and is less accepted because both participants were of a similar age, rather than older men with younger men? I hope you can answer me. Thank you very much for your attention and constant work!

Modern Debate and Ancient Attitudes Regarding Alexander and Hephaistion

So, by debate, I’m not entirely clear in what arena the asker meant, academic or popular (or both), and the acceptance of these would also differ between then and now. So, I’ll try to hit several points below, to cover all the bases.

In antiquity, yes, same-age-cohort romantic relationships were less accepted, but we do see visual evidence for them. In contrast, moderns tend to be squicked by too much of an age gap, while some pictures of older men with youths would suggest as much as 10 (or more!) years. Of course, ancient marriage also included quite substantial age differences, so they’d be puzzled by our abhorrence. The fact Alexander and Hephaistion were around the same age makes their pairing more acceptable to the modern mind, rather than less.

Also, Achilles and Patroklos weren’t the same age. Patroklos was older. (The perception that they were the same age might owe to The Song of Achilles.) To the ancients, the problem in their case was the younger partner having the superior social status. Both were princes, but Achilles was the celebrated warrior and son of a goddess, which problematized it. (I made use of this at the end of Becoming, in Dancing with the Lion.)

So, we must separate ancient reactions from modern ones. What bothered them is rather different from what bothers us.

As for debate about the relationships themselves, by the 4th century, the average Greek did assume Achilles and Patroklos had been lovers, although there was some pushback among the mythographers apparently, whose point (not unlike moderns’) was that Homer never called them that. Yet Homer “coded” Patroklos’s behavior as closer to female, paralleling him with some of the women such as Andromache; this is likely why, when Aeschylus did portray them as lovers in the Myrmiddons, he made Patroklos younger, despite it contradicting Homer (and tradition). Yet a lot of post-Homer literature changed or contradicted Homer, so that wasn’t unusual. I’ve often said that we can regard both lyric poetry and tragic plays as “fanfic” on Homer and the other epic poets. 😊 They played fast and loose with the details of Homeric canon.

Similarly, by the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial eras, Hephaistion as Alexander’s lover was also assumed. How widely is less clear, but wide enough for an aphorism to emerge that Alexander had been conquered only by Hephaistion’s thighs. The Latin authors Justin and even Curtius use language for Hephaistion that’s suggestive of a sexual favorite, without coming out and saying so. Note, however, neither of them meant that in a good way. It would have been an insult for an adult male and military general to be Alexander’s boy-toy.

Now, as for modern resistance to the idea, these fall into two basic categories: 1) homophobic, and 2) critical attention to the source problem. These are obviously not the same. Homophobic speaks for itself and was the driving force up until the 1960s/70s, as I’ve explained elsewhere. After that, most specialists on Alexander swung to general assumption/acceptance of Alexander and Hephaistion as lovers. “Of course,” with a shoulder shrug.

Achilles and Patroklos are harder because they’re fictional, not real people. They did exist prior to Homer, but we’re still dealing with a piece of literature, not trying to see behind the curtain of historical accounts to what real people did (or didn’t do). That means the question is what Homer meant, which becomes literary interpretation. We might even ask if what Homer meant is all that important, versus how Homer was understood by subsequent generations. These are not real people. But Alexander and Hephaistion were, so that’s a horse of a different color.

Current academic questioning of Hephaistion and Alexander as lovers arises from a SOURCE issue. E.g., when the sources were written and what they imply. We don’t have anything until 300 years after Alexander’s reign, and that earliest source (Diodoros) doesn’t imply anything. Does that owe to Diodoros’s general abbreviated nature? Or did he imply nothing because there was nothing?

It’s not till we hit Curtius and Second Sophistic authors—or those even later such as Athenaeus (end of the second century CE)—that we find “hints and allegations,” or even blunt claims. So what’s that about? Were they using implication as a form of character assassination for Hephaistion, and Alexander too? Were they simply repeating “common knowledge” that arose more from gossip than reality? Athenaeus (603a/13.80) is quite blunt in stating Alexander liked “boys” (meaning youths), but he’s also 600+ years from Alexander. And he never links Alexander to Hephaistion; Hephaistion wasn’t, after all, a “boy.”

In short, we must look at how THEY meant it and detach that from how WE might understand it … or what we might like it to mean. This will (inevitably) annoy both sides of the socio-political fence: those who hate the idea that Alexander might have had male lovers AND those who really, really, really want him to have been gay.

It’s also why historians make enemies among the extreme Right and the extreme Left. We want history to be history, not political sloganeering.

In the ancient—especially Roman—world, two adult men carrying on a sexual affair past their very early 20s (at the latest) was BAD. So, those authors who are engaged in a program of portraying Alexander as sinking into Oriental Debauchery found it useful to imply that Alexander 1) kept a bunch of concubines, 2) had sex with a Persian eunuch (who he let influence official policy), and 3) even retained his very own general as his lover. That’s Curtius—bluntly for the first two, and with a with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge for the third. (As does Justin, albeit in abbreviated form.)

Arrian, who had a different—less negative—goal, is more restrained, ignoring claims of concubines and a eunuch. In his history, he never bluntly calls Hephaistion Alexander’s lover, but in his writings on Epiktatos, he does. Or rather, he has Epiktatos say so. In the history, Arrian uses comparatives with Achilles and Patroklos to imply what he wants to imply. The reader is meant to make the connection. This probably owes to Arrian’s flattery of his friend the Emperor Hadrian, who had Antinoös.

Plutarch is different yet again. Early in his biography, he portrays Alexander as a champion of sophrosune, so he didn’t carry on with anybody except his wives, and then only for love. (For reasons that are not Christian, which my friend and colleague Borja Antela-Benardez will address in a forthcoming book.) Yet too often, readers take his early claims as true in an absolute way and miss how Plutarch portrays Alexander changing (for the worse) in his later years. That owes to a tendency for readers to approach Plutarch piecemeal because of the anecdotal nature of the work. Don’t do that. How is Plutarch using that anecdote…and where is it in the larger work? Those questions matter. A lot. It also owes to people taking material from his rhetorical essays, “On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander,” and mixing them up with his Life.

ANYway…. looking at all that, one can understand why trying to figure out what was really going on between Alexander and Hephaistion is…rough, to say the least.

What is calumnia (invented accusation to cause harm to someone’s reputation), versus simple gossip, versus Roman and earlier southern Greek/Athenian pearl-clutching over differing Macedonian sexual practices?

It’s genuinely hard to know.

If they were lovers as youths, then “grew out of” the physical but maintained the emotional attachment, that would explain such things as Alexander’s extreme reaction to Hephaistion’s death. And also, why later historians (dealing with events in their adulthood) didn’t mention it.

YET that assumes they were childhood friends. It’s probably one of the biggest difference between my evaluation of Hephaistion and Sabine’s—when did Hephaistion join the army and meet Alexander? I don’t plan to go into that here; I’ll save it for the book.

Another possibility, which rests on Theopompos’s criticisms of Philip’s court, is that Macedonians ended same-sex affairs later than southern Greek city-states, or at least later than Athens. That takes us back to the calumnia-or-pearl-clutching question. If such affairs did continue later in Macedonia, then Alexander and Hephaistion may not have been especially unusual, although they would have been expected to end things once they reached marriageable age.

And last, of course, is the very real possibility that they never were lovers, simply as close as brothers.

The difficulty there is a sort of reverse-homophobia, that anyone who claims such a thing must BE homophobic and deliberately trying to repress the Truth <tm>. This gets a bit exhausting to discuss with the average person who may not care about the ins-and-outs of source problems. It also, unfortunately, then feeds complaints by the alt-right about “political correctness” taking over history. That is JUST as frustrating for people trying to make a cogent historical argument. For some, if the explanation is longer than 3 sentences, it’s TL;DR. They prefer the short (and usually wrong) answer. Don’t bother me with the details. Oh, and shut up about the details, you’re just harshing my historical squee.

Yeah, I might get a bit frustrated with this.

I say that as someone who does think Alexander and Hephaistion were lovers, at least when younger. But I have sympathy for my colleagues who, for perfectly valid historiographic reasons, do not. So here I am, waving my arms around and saying, “Stop picking on them!” Even while I plan to make my own arguments against their position in the book. I have historiographic reasons of my own for believing I’m right—but accusations of homophobia are not among them.

For other posts I’ve done on various angles:

#asks #Alexander the Great #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #alexander x hephaestion #classics #ancient history #ancient attitudes about sexuality #Alexander the Great as gay #Achilles and Patroklos #Patrochilles #homophobia towards Alexander the Great #homophobia towards Achilles

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