by León, Vicki
The root also shows up in gymnosophists, the name that Alexander the Great and the Macedonians gave to the naked philosophers they bumped into during their lengthy stay in India. Although the Greeks used the terms brahman and gymnosophist interchangeably, the former was an orthodox priestly caste. The latter men were equally skeptical of Brahman beliefs and of the Jain philosophy of nonviolence. They were rebels who lived “sky clad,” out in nature rather than in towns. Like the Spartans, these naked sages praised the simple life, calling nudity healthy, efficient, and a great method of building endurance. Even today, those beliefs remain embedded in the male psyche, as most women would affirm.
The trouble with togas? Keeping that white wool clean. Lacking soap, ancient dry cleaners used human urine to do the job.
Pulcheria of Byzantium:
Power chastity rocked
Hardly anyone thinks of Byzantine women, power politics, and lifelong chastity in the same breath, although at least one chose this route to reign in a big way during the last centuries of the bifurcated Roman Empire.
Pulcheria was the precocious powerhouse example. At fifteen, she stepped up as regent empress for her weak young brother Theo, thereby running the eastern half of the Roman Empire from Constantinople. Her era, the centuries when Christianity really took hold, opened a new avenue of independence for women: career chastity. Not just as nuns or mother superiors, either. Pulcheria was astute enough to see that the best way to keep her autonomy was to give herself, body and soul, only to the church. Her “virgin for life” ceremony, being Byzantine, was gloriously pompous and dazzling. She was much applauded. As a mark of approval, the Roman senate also gave her more political power by declaring her Augusta in 414. That title got her treated equally among other rulers and men of power. Her face appeared on a variety of classy gold coins, too, showing her being crowned by the right hand of God, no less.
As regent empress, Pulcheria immediately fired the eunuch tutor in charge of her little brother’s education. Now her first order of business was to make him into a figurehead emperor; she personally tutored him on his studies, his duties, and even his choice of a mate. When she wasn’t reciting passages from Scripture or fasting twice a week, big sister put young Theo through his paces. A sampling of her lesson plans: how to speak with dignity; how to walk; how to restrain loud laughter; and how to ride a horse in an imperial fashion.
Being a Byzantine empress was swell. Even better was Pulcherias approach to it: career virgin.
A kind boy, Theo was careless and easily swayed. This being Byzantium, palace intrigue and outsider coup attempts were omnipresent. As Theo went through puberty, aristocrats fielded their own marital candidate from Antioch, a sleek Greek named Eudocia. Although she was still Theo’s puppet master, Pulcheria could do little to thwart him when her opponents managed to dangle their bride material in front of the teen, who snapped at Eudocia like a hungry trout.
Pulcheria still had supreme control; her brother was a trusting soul, too trusting. To show him the error of his ways, she placed a document on the table before him. He duly signed without reading it, as he’d always done. With a sigh, his big sister then made a point of reading aloud what he had just signed. It was a contract giving Pulcheria a new slave: Theo’s new wife! They all had a hearty fake laugh, as she finally tore it up.
Her credentials as the true CEO of Byzantium fully established, Pulcheria forged ahead with her organizational plans while not neglecting her piety projects, including a massive amount of church building.
Truth be told, Theo enjoyed having his older sister micro-manage; in fact, when a small war with Persia bubbled up in 420, he told everyone that her extreme piety—and her strict chastity—was directly responsible for the success of the Byzantine armies in the field.
As the years rolled on, a rift developed between Theo and his wife Eudocia; at length she slunk off to the Holy Land, ostensibly to make a pilgrimage. Pulcheria couldn’t help but gloat a bit; she gloated even more whenever Pope Leo wrote or came calling, asking for her help in the latest theological quarrels.
In the summer of A.D. 450, her beloved brother Theo—evidently forgetting momentarily how to ride a horse in true imperial fashion—fell from his mount and injured his spine. Two days later, he died. Before he did so, he had a heart-to-heart with his sister and an obscure military officer named Marcian about a premonition he’d had. In it, he saw Marcian ruling Byzantium. Dream premonitions being one of those omens you didn’t ignore in old Byzantium, he urged Pulcheria to wed Marcian.
Pulcheria was already worried, pondering her future, since legally the Roman senate would not make her (being female) sole ruler, even though they respected and feared her. After Theo died, she was shattered, spending the next month arranging for her brother’s huge public funeral. At the same time, she entered into negotiations with the mild-mannered Marcian. And they came to terms—her terms, naturally. The first being, absolutely no sex. She was a career virgin, by God, and intended to stay that way.
Pulcheria had three glorious years to run things her way before she left the material world in A.D. 453. Because she loved Constantinople and its people, she left all her worldly goods to local charities and to the poor—a staggering amount of real estate and other property. As befits a martinet to the last, she bossily instructed her husband Marcian to do the same. Or else!
Possibly garnering the most Obscure Roman Emperor award, Marcian peacefully ruled for three years before dying of gangrene. We still don’t know if he followed Pulcheria’s postmortem orders.
Section III
Legendary Loves & Sometimes-Real Romances
The Sacred Band:
They were called “an army of lovers”
Hardly anyone ever mentions Thebes, thirty-three miles northwest of Athens in the region of Boeotia, once a powerful urban center that dominated the rest of Greece. (If mentioned at all, it is invariably confused with the Egyptian Thebes, a city straddling the Nile River that was Egypt’s capital for centuries.)
Grecian Thebes was home to the Sacred Band, a powerhouse special military force comprised of 150 pairs of older male/younger male lovers. Today it’s often confused with the Three Hundred, the band of Spartan warriors who in 480 B.C. held off the gigantic Persian army of Xerxes at the pass of Thermopylae long enough to give Greek allies time to meet the foe at Marathon. Recently popularized in films and comics, the Three Hundred had many parallels with the Sacred Band, as you’ll see.
How and why did the Sacred Band come into being? According to Greek historian Plutarch (himself a native Boeotian), this elite force took its inspiration from a quote in The Symposium by Plato, written seven years before the group’s formation, which said in part, “If only there were a way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloveds, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonor, and emulating one another in honor.”
Democratic Thebes was known for its serene acceptance of same-sex male relationships. There, lovers pledged their devotion at a tomb sacred to the cult of Hercules and his young lover Iolaus. After pledging, male couples often lived together in a marriage recognized by all citizens.
Soon after the year 404 B.C., all of Greece began to suffer under the harsh regime of the Spartans, newly victorious over the Athenians and its allies during the Peloponnesian War. In reaction, the Thebans handpicked three hundred men who were committed couples from the ranks of their existing citizen army. They trained together, coming up with inventive maneuvers—such as deeper phalanx formations and the use of shields as offensive weapons—which eventually became part of their “shock troops” strategy. By degrees, they made their city preeminent, recognized by other Greeks as a top military power.
In 375 B.C. they beat the Spartans by defeating an army three times their size. Four years later, under the leadership of generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas, they decisively kicked Spartan hiney again at Leuctra—called by many historians the most
important battle ever waged, Greek against Greek.
The victories of the Sacred Band let the Thebans and other Greeks dare to hope that the Spartans were not, in fact, invincible. Thebes’ extraordinary general Epaminondas (a philosopher and orator when not on the battlefield) then carried the ball forward, freeing the large provinces of Arcadia and Messenia from Spartan rule, and laying successful siege to Sparta’s capital as well.
But a new power emerged that even the Sacred Band could not quell. As a teen, king-to-be Philip II of Macedon had spent three years (368 to 365 B.C.) as a hostage in then-triumphant Thebes, where he studied (and later copied) their fighting methods and strategies. Once he became king, Philip set off to conquer all of Greece, eventually confronting the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea in 358 B.C., with his eighteen-year-old son Alexander (later dubbed “the Great”) as second in command.
King Philip, a busy bisexual, admired the Sacred Band of Thebes, whose all-gay warrior couples he nevertheless slew.
There he confronted the Sacred Band—which he attacked with his army of cavalry and troops using long spears, the Macedonian way of warfare. The members of the Sacred Band stood their ground, fighting fiercely, until all three hundred men perished.
Greek historian Plutarch wrote about the moment after the battle, when King Philip found their bodies and learned that this was the band of lovers and beloveds: “He burst into tears and said: ‘If anyone who thinks that these men did anything disgraceful, may they perish miserably.’”(Plutarch, who wrote these words four hundred years after Philip, also noted that public pledges by male lovers were still part of Theban daily life.)
On that battlesite, the common grave of the Sacred Band was topped with a memorial of a huge marble lion that stands there still, having been restored in 1902 by the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society of English homosexuals.
History often piles irony upon irony; such was the fate of King Philip II of Macedon. After destroying the Sacred Band, Phillip would meet his own death at the hands of a man called Pausanias the Elder. The assassin was one of Philip’s former male lovers.
Alex & Hephaestion:
Love conquers all—even Alex the Great
Theirs was a love often compared to that of Achilles and Patroclus, the great heroes of the Trojan War; the comparison is apt. Homer’s Iliad revolves around the relationship—by turns friends, lovers, and male bonding in a war setting. As Alexander and Hephaestion would do, Achilles and Patroclus face injury, treachery, and tragic loss.
Before he was even Great, Alex knew and loved Hephaestion, who was probably one year his senior. Sons of Macedonian nobles, they were boyhood chums who studied in tandem with philosopher-teacher Aristotle in a green and lovely part of Macedonia called Mieza. Aristotle, invariably thought of as “Athenian Greek,” was actually from Macedonia; Philip II hired him to give his son and a select few of his peers the best possible education.
Besides Aristotle’s lectures and classes, the two boys learned to ride, sail, and fight on foot and horseback, skills that they’d need as warriors. Did the teens become intimate at that time? We cannot know, but it seems likely.
At age eighteen, Prince Alex got his first taste of warfare at the battle of Chaeronea in Greece. He led the successful charge against the enemy—and his performance stunned his father.
By the time that steadfast friends Alex and Hephaestion were twenty and twenty-one, King Philip II had been assassinated and his son took on the mantle of leadership. With alacrity and skill, Alex and the Macedonian fighting force began what would become his decade-long world conquest, moving south through Greece and then into Asia Minor.
In May of 334 B.C., the Macedonian juggernaut reached the ancient city of Troy. Alex and his best bud immediately went to the resting place of Achilles and Patroclus to lay wreaths on their tombs. Afterward, they ran a footrace in the nude to honor their dead heroes. This much-told story cemented the general belief that the two were lovers.
Their army continued to record victory after victory as they worked their way south and east. At the battle of Issus, the Macedonians defeated the Persians for the first time. Persian king Darius was killed and his queen Statira captured. In her first meeting with Alexander, the queen immediately kneeled in front of the taller young man—Hephaestion. Terrified at her blunder, she began to apologize to Alex, who said, “Don’t worry, Mother. Everywhere, he is Alexander, too.”
Like his father, Alexander the Great was bisexual. He, however, maintained a steadfast love for his partner Hephaestion until death parted them.
In that long-ago egocentric and boastful world, his graceful and greathearted tribute remains one of the most moving endorsements of love and friendship.
In our world, where sexual identity is often parsed into neat categories, Alexander and Hephaestion would both be called bisexuals, since they subsequently married a variety of women and also carried on love affairs with ones they did not wed. Despite both men’s affection for their women and Alex’s probable liaison with the Persian eunuch known as Bagoas, the tight bond between them continued.
Hephaestion was not a great warrior, but he did a good job, commanding under the most trying of circumstances. He was an excellent organizer and a skilled diplomat by all accounts; Alex trusted him implicitly. Unlike others in the inner circle, Hephaestion never betrayed his commander or let him down. That says much about his character—and likewise the character of Alex, who wasn’t always a benign and loving leader, either.
In 330 B.C., Hephaestion uncovered and revealed a plot against his friend’s life. Inevitably that made others more jealous of his special relationship with Alex, given the power struggles between ambitious men in the inner circle.
After years of harsh battles, difficult weather, struggles through awful terrain and unknown territories as far as India, Alex’s four armies, including one under Hephaestion’s command, rejoined Alexander at a place called Carmania in southwest Asia (today’s Iran). In December of 325 B.C., they celebrated wildly, Alex decorating his key officers and giving some of them, Hephaestion included, golden diadems. A few years earlier, these macho Macedonians would have considered these crowns effeminately Persian, but in their travels they’d all become more accepting of others’ customs.
Next, since Alexander never did anything in a small or conventional way, he organized a mass wedding ceremony between eighty of his top Macedonian officers and eighty Persian princesses who’d gotten a Greek education in the five years since Alex had conquered their nation. Days of lavish ceremonies followed, with Hephaestion marrying a daughter of Persian king Darius, and Alex tying the knot as well. All seemed smooth sailing now; Alex was happy and busy with plans for sending a naval expedition to Arabia.
Then it all came crashing down. In the fall of 324 B.C., Alex came to Ecbatana, one of his new capital cities. Naturally the Macedonian boys threw a drinking party. The next day, Hephaestion fell sick. A hangover, everyone assumed. Seven days later, he died of a fever.
Alex was beyond stunned. He had lost what he called “the friend I valued as my own life.” As historian Arrian wrote, “Alex flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there in tears, refusing to be parted until he was dragged away forcefully by the men in his inner circle.” Plutarch noted that “Alex ordered mourning throughout the empire, and asked the oracle at Egyptian Siwa if the god Amon would permit Hephaestion to be worshipped as a god.” Amon refused but did permit Alex’s lover to be worshipped as a divine hero.
Hephaestion’s funeral was spectacular and costly, the equivalent of millions of dollars in today’s currency. The funeral pyre resembled a Babylonian ziggurat, seven stories high, loaded with 240 ships and scenes rendered in gold of centaur battles, lions, and bulls. Part of Babylon’s city walls were demolished to build the platform for the pyre, and according to Greek historian Strabo, it took ten thousand workmen two months to clear the site afterward.
The permanent memorial to Hephaestion that Alex planned may never have been
completed. In a strange echo of his lover, Alexander himself was to die, unexpectedly, of a mysterious fever the following June of the year 323 B.C.
Servilia & Julius Caesar:
History’s first cougar
Ashton Kutcher wasn’t the first famous man to fall in love with an older woman. Some 2,100 years ago, a man universally famous in his time (and ours) fell hard for a Roman patrician pushing fifty, with four kids and two marriages under her belt.
Her name? Servilia Caepionis. She came from one of Rome’s most distinguished families. A shrewd, well-connected political dynamo, she remains unsung even after being brought to vivid life in several films and television series in recent years.
Her thirty six-year-old lover? None other than Gaius Julius Caesar.
The two met while Servilia was raising her children from her first and second marriages. After an immediate and mutual attraction, she became Caesar’s mistress around 64 B.C. Julius soon gave his lover a gorgeous black pearl rumored to have cost around six million sesterces—a huge sum in any language. She stayed married to her second husband, Decimus Silanus, who seems to have been a go-along guy. It paid off, too. A couple of years later, Caesar supported Silanus in his successful political bid for Roman consul.
Likewise, Caesar’s string of three wives seemed to have put up with the long-term arrangement.
Like her lover Caesar, Servilia was outrageous—even reckless at times. In 63 B.C., her half brother Cato, also a senator, and Caesar opposed each other during a fierce debate over the Cataline conspiracy. At one point, someone handed Julius a letter—which Cato took to be from the Cataline conspirators.
