spotlight reigniting romance


alexander & hephaestion


MILITARY HISTORY’S GREATEST HERO HAD A BOYFRIEND


Alexander the Great of Macedonia, inarguably one


of military history’s greatest conquering heroes, had a boyfriend...at least two in fact. As the online reconstructor of humanity’s past,


Ancient Originspoints out, one of the world’s most noted experts on the life of Alexander, the University of Cambridge’s Professor Paul Cartledge writes in a work titled,Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past:


The question of Alexander’s sexuality— his predominant sexual orientation—has enlivened, or bedeviled, much Alexander scholarship. That he loved at least two men there can be little doubt. The first was the Macedonian noble Hephaestion, a friend from boyhood, whom he looked on—and may actually have referred to—as his alter ego. The Persian queen mother, it was said, once mistook the taller Hephaestion for Alexander, who graciously excused her blushes by murmuring that ‘He too is Alexander.’ Whether Alexander’s relationship with the slightly older Hephaestion was ever of the sort that once dared not speak its name is not certain, but it is likely enough that it was. At any rate, Macedonian and Greek mores would have favored an actively sexual component rather than inhibiting or censoring it. Like hunting, homosexuality was thought to foster masculine, especially martial, bravery.”


22 RAGE monthly | FEBRUARY 2018


In fact, according to Cartledge and a


host of other experts on love and sex in the ancient world and of the Greeks’ one-time military supremacy, male soldiers were encouraged to be physically and emotion- ally intimate with one another. The theory went that amorously familiar fighters were more effective as units on the battlefield. My own experience in 2018 is that when


bi, gay and perhaps to a lesser degree, pansexual male compatriots talk about mat- ters of the heart, conversations range from brief and vague, to dismissive or sarcastic. But, get us talking about gay sex and the talk becomes easy and full-bodied. Compared to the nuance and profundity that defined Alexander’s and Hephaestion’s lifelong love affair as it’s been described by Cambridge’s Cartlege, our approach today to gay love is arguably less open and sophisticated than nearly 3000 years ago.


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