Amorous soldiers and Amazons: queer tales from antiquity

Many viewers of the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster Troy were disappointed to see its erasure of one of the great love stories to come down to us from antiq­uity. The film’s director, Wolfgang Petersen, and scriptwriter, David Benioff, presented a vehemently heterosexual Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) shown in bed with women whenever the script allowed. The great love of Achilles’ life, his cousin Patroclus (also spelled Patroklos), was reduced to a coincidental relative occupying minimal screen time, making Achilles’ uncontrollable rage at his subsequent death seem misplaced and far-fetched.

The film also left out a queer backstory from Achilles’ past (perhaps understandable due to the constraints of running time) that was recounted by the Roman poet Statius in his Achilleid (c. 94–96 CE). Here Achilles’ mother, the goddess Thetis, fearful of the coming Trojan War, hid her son among the daughters of King Lycomedes on the island of Scyros, where he was discovered by Odysseus cross-dressing as a woman and (after marrying Lycurgus’s daughter Deidamia and having a son with her) was persuaded to join the war against Troy.  

The friendship between the celebrated Greek warriors Achilles and Patroclus is one of the central stories within Homer’s Iliad, a sprawling narrative of the war between Greece and Troy, composed in the eighth century BCE. Scenes from the Trojan War drawn from Homer’s epic poem became a staple in ancient Greek art, as seen on this Chalkidian vase from 540 BCE, which depicts Achilles fatally spearing a fallen Trojan warrior.

We learn in the Iliad that Achilles enslaves a woman, Briseis, as a prize of war and possibly also a sexual partner; indeed, within the poem, Achilles declares, ‘I now loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’.¹The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1951, Book 9, p. 342–3, p. 207.

His principal relationship in the poem, however, is clearly with his comrade-in-arms, the elder warrior Patroclus. The two have been friends since childhood, and Achilles is shattered when Patroclus is killed during the conflict by the Trojan warrior Hector. In a furious rage, Homer tells us, Achilles pursues Hector and slays him in revenge. Standing over Hector’s body, he declares to his companions:

There is a dead man who lies by the ships, unwept, unburied: Patroklos: and I will not forget him, never so long as I remain among the living and my knees have their spring beneath me. And though the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, even there I shall still remember my beloved companion.²Iliad, Book 22: 386–9, Lattimore, p. 445.

Achilles then defiles Hector’s body, dragging it around the walls of Troy, as shown in a seventeenth-century etching by Pietro Testa. Later in the Iliad, Achilles speaks as he buries Patroclus of how ‘I have laid Patroklos on the burning pyre, and heaped the mound over him, and cut my hair for him, since there will come no second sorrow like this to my heart again while I am still one of the living’.³Iliad, Book 23: 45–7, Lattimore, p. 451. Homer, as narrator of the epic poem, further tells us:

Achilles wept still as he remembered his beloved companion, nor did sleep who subdues all come over him, but he tossed from one side to the other in longing for Patroklos, for his manhood and his great strength and all the actions he had seen to the end with him.⁴Iliad, Book 24: 3–8, Lattimore, p. 475.

Opinion remains divided about the exact physical nature of the relationship between Homer’s famous warrior couple, although numerous commentators since the early twentieth century have sided with the belief that theirs was a sexual coupling. ‘From the third book [of the Iliad] onwards’, argued Hans Licht in 1932,

the love of the two youths, Achilles and Patroclus, runs through the whole poem until the conclusion, and is represented in such detail that one can no longer speak of mere friendship … All this is the language of love, not of friendship, and so the ancients have nearly always regarded the bond.⁵ Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, trans. J. H. Freese, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1932, p. 450. See also David M. Halperin, ‘Heroes and their pals’, in David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, Routledge, New York and London, 1990, pp. 75–87.

More recently, the feminist academic Camille Paglia has dismissed such argument, calling notions of a love affair between Achilles and Patroclus ‘a Hellenistic [232–31 BCE] fantasy not in Homer’.⁶ Camille Paglia, ‘Review of John Boswell, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe’, The Washington Post, 17 July 1994, online at sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/bosrev-paglia, accessed 8 June 2021. Even in pre-Hellenistic times, however, ancient authors sided with the view that Homer’s warrior couple were lovers. Plato’s classic dialogue on male same-sex love, the Symposium, written around 385 BCE, tells us for example of how the tragedian Aeschylus (c. 525/24 – c. 456/55 BCE) wrote a now-lost play, Myrmidons, depicting Achilles and Patroclus as a sexually active couple.⁷Plato: Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994, p. 12. Plato’s Symposium also contains a speech in praise of the usefulness of male-to-male love affairs in warfare:

The best conceivable organization (supposing it were somehow possible) for a community or a battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends, since they’d compete with each other in avoiding any kind of shameful act. It’s hardly an exag­geration to say that a handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world. I mean, it goes without saying that the last person a lover wants to be seen by, in the act of deserting or throwing away his weapons, is his boyfriend … The effect that Love has on lovers is exactly what Homer described, when he talked about a god ‘breathing might’ into some hero or other.⁸ ibid., p. 11.

Such a fighting force did exist in the ancient world at that very time. The Sacred Band of Thebes, organised in the fourth century BCE, consisted of 150 pairs of male lovers, united in battle by their passionate commitment to each other. Ancient authors described the Sacred Band in exactly these terms, as ‘devoted to each other by mutual obligations of love’, to use the words of the Macedonian author Polyaenus, who wrote his Στρατηγήματα or The Stratagems of War in the second century CE.⁹Polyaenus: Stratagems, 163 CE, Book 2: 5.2, adapted from the translation by R. Shepherd (1793), online at www.attalus.org/translate/polyaenus2, accessed 8 June 2021. The Roman author Plutarch (46 – after 119 CE) records how Philip II of Macedon, after killing all of the Sacred Band of Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, wept before their entwined bodies, saying ‘perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base’.¹⁰ Plutarch, ‘Pelopidas’, in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Arthur Hugh Clough, J. M. Dent & Sons, London and E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1910, p. 447. See also Louis Crompton, ‘“An army of lovers” – The Sacred Band of Thebes’, History Today, vol. 44, no. 11, Nov. 1994, pp. 23–9.

In ancient Greek there were no words for either heterosexual or homo­sexual, and sexual relations by men with both male and female partners were not uncommon. It should be noted that our knowledge of sexuality in both ancient Greece and Rome pertains mainly to men – both cultures being patriarchal, and surviving texts being by predominantly male authors, little has been handed down concerning the personal experiences of women in these societies. Exactly how same-sex relations between men were socially perceived in ancient Greece remains a point of scholarly contention. Queer cultural historian David M. Halp­erin has interpreted sexuality in Classical Athens as being predicated upon ‘the hierarchical structure of the Athenian polity’, whereby sex, whether same-sex or heteronormative, was ‘an action performed by a social superior upon a social inferior’. Under this system, he argues, ‘an adult, male citizen of Athens could have legitimate sexual relations’ with ‘women of any age, free males past the age of puberty who were not yet old enough to be citizens … as well as foreigners and slaves of either sex’.¹¹ David M. Halperin, ‘Is there a history of sexuality?’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale & David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New York and London, 1993, p. 418. Another school of thought declares, however, that same-sex relations were ‘never, at least in Classical Athens, unproblematic’.¹² T. K. Hubbard, ‘Popular perceptions of elite homosexuality in classical Athens’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 6, no. 1, spring–summer, 1998, p. 49.

Whatever contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality were in ancient Greek times, there is no denying that a wealth of representations of same-sex sexual relations permeate Greek art, literature and philosophical discussion, such that ‘the love of males … was pervasive throughout all levels of Greek society and held an honored place in Greek culture for more than a thousand years, that is, from before 600 BCE to about 400 CE’.¹³ Louis Crompton, Homosexuality & Civilization, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 2. On this, see Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978, passim. This is also reflected in the open sexuality of many of the deities worshipped in ancient Greek culture. Apollo, for example, the Greek god of the sun, music and dance, among other things, was renowned for having a whole host of female and male lovers. Halperin notes how in the closing book of the Iliad, ‘Apollo is astonished by Achilles’s love for Patroclus because it surpasses in its intensity, he says (24.44–52), not the love of women but the love that most men bear towards a brother or a son’.¹⁴ Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, p. 84.

Among Apollo’s male lovers, according to ancient sources, were Admetus, king of Pherae, whom he subsequently helped to marry; the Spartan prince Hyacinth, whom he accidentally killed with a discus; and the shepherd Branchus. Dionysus, the god of wine and grapes, was romantically smitten with the handsome satyr Ampelos, whom he turned into the first grapevine. Her­mes (Mercury in Roman mythology), messenger of the gods, while fathering numerous children with his female conquests, also took male lovers such as Zeus’s sons Amphion and Perseus. Hermes/Mercury was ‘evoked as “Hermes of the Underworld” in both homoerotic and lesbian love spells undertaken in Alexandria, Egypt during the third century CE’.¹⁵ Entry on Hermes in Randy P. Conner, David Hatfield Sparks & Mariya Sparks (eds), Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit, Cassell, London, 1997, p. 176.

According to the Metamorphoses, composed in 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid, the mythical Greek songwriter Orpheus, grieving after the death of his wife Eurydice, ‘had shrunk from loving any woman’, and ‘preferred to centre his affections on boys of tender years, and to enjoy the brief spring and early flowering of their youth’.¹⁶The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1955, Book X, p. 247. This followed the ancient Greek custom where­by male same-sex couples were often made up of an older man, the erastês (ἐραστής, meaning ‘lover’ in the ancient Greek language), and a younger man, the (ἐρώμενος, the ‘beloved’). Known as pederasty, these relationships between grown men and adolescent youths seem particularly exploitative and unpleasant from a twenty-first-century perspective. As religious studies historian Christine Downing has cogently noted, this ‘age disparity was what gave the relationship its value and what made it morally problematic’.¹⁷ Christine Downing, ‘Lesbian mythology’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 1994, p. 173. In the end, Orpheus was killed by being violently torn apart by female devotees of the wine god, not so much because of these ephebic infidelities, but rather because they felt that he had abandoned his former devotions to their own master Dionysus.

Same-sex relations were not confined to the ancient male gods. The Greek goddess of the hunt and the god Apollo’s sister, Artemis (Diana in Roman mythol­ogy), forsook the love of men and surrounded herself with beautiful nymphs. According to the poet Callimachus, writing in the third century BCE, Artemis/ Diana was especially enamoured of the female archer Britomartis, the hunt­ing-enthusiast princess Cyrene (who would eventually be seduced by Apollo himself), and Anticlea, mother of the Trojan War hero Odysseus. ‘For thee too’, Callimachus writes,

the Amazons, whose mind is set on war, in Ephesus beside the sea established an image beneath an oak trunk, and Hippo [the Ama­zon queen] performed a holy rite for thee, and they themselves, O Upis Queen [another name for Artemis], around the image danced a war-dance – first in shields and armour, and again in a circle arraying a spacious choir.¹⁸ Callimachus, Hymn III: 237–42, in Calli¬machus: Hymns and Epigrams, trans. Alexander William Mair, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and William Heinemann, London, 1955, p. 81.

The Amazons, first recorded in Homer’s Iliad where they are described as άντιάνειραι (antianeirai) or ‘men’s equals’, were the legendary tribe of warrior women who lived a separatist existence on the physical fringes of the ancient Greek world.¹⁹Iliad, Book 3: 189, Lattimore, p. 105. Amazon historian Andrew Stewart lightheartedly calls them ‘liminal figures, living somewhat beyond the outskirts of the Greek world: not the girls next door but the girls on the next block’.²⁰ Andrew Stewart, ‘Imag(in)ing the other: Amazons and ethnicity in fifth-century Athens’, Poetics Today, vol. 16, no. 4, Winter 1995, p. 576. In ancient Greek art the Amazons are often imaged wearing eastern-style clothing, signifying their symbolic role in Greek culture as the Other, where they represented ‘the woes of wild, untamed behavior to contrast with the emerging Athenian concepts of a controlled society’.²¹ Heidi Jo Davis-Soylu, ‘Pretty fierce: Amazon women and art education’, Visual Arts Research, vol. 37, no. 2, Winter 2011, p. 116. The axe-wielding, horse-riding Amazon Andromache and her companion are shown attired in patterned shirts and trousers on a vase in the NGV’s collection made in the Greek colony of Apulia, Italy in 420 BCE, as well as sporting distinctive pointed caps resembling those worn by contemporary Scythian archers (nomadic eastern warriors who were familiar sights on the streets of Athens at this time).²² See Dietrich von Bothmer, Amazons in Greek Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1957, p. 6.

Living apart from men, with whom they copulated solely for the purposes of procreation, and raising only the girls from those brief unions within their same-sex gendered military community, the Amazons, as cultural historian Peter Walcot has argued,

are fantasy creatures, the type of predatory woman or domina; they are everything a woman ought not to be and they define the norm and the acceptable by setting that norm on its head; they illustrate the appalling consequence of woman usurping what is properly man’s role and emphasize man’s fear of any attempt at such a usurpation.²³ Peter Walcot, ‘Greek attitudes towards women: the mythological evidence’, Greece & Rome, vol. 31, no. 1, April 1984, p. 42.

Despite their once-yearly mating with men, the Amazons functioned in a decidedly queer female-only realm, in which, according to Christine Downing, their ‘sexuality was mostly lived out among themselves’, and in the face of which ‘the Greek myths about the Amazons express male dread of female power’.²⁴ Downing, p. 176.

In 1972, perhaps reflecting on then contemporary stereotypes of butch lesbians, Amazon historian Donald J. Sobol concluded:

If we concede that the Amazons may have lived, and add the pos­sibility to their ten months of manlessness each year, we must confront as our sum an erotic practice rarely if ever associated with them. Since purity and celibacy are hardly to be credited to women so vitally conscious of their bodies, female homosexuality must be the explanation for the gratification of their impulses and for the success of their military operations.²⁵ Donald J. Sobol, The Amazons of Greek Mythology, A. S. Barnes and Co., New York, and Thomas Yoselof, London, 1972, p. 145. See also TammyJo Eckhart, ‘An author-centered approach to understanding Amazons in the ancient world’, PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2007, pp. 176–7, online at core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213815506.pdf, accessed 8 June 2021.

Same-sex relations between women clearly permeate what survives from the hand of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho, a writer from the island of Lesbos who composed a large body of work at the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Although, as Halperin has pointed out, same-sex erotic readings of her love poetry appear only in Rome late in the first century BCE, for, ‘a fact as curious as it is overlooked – no extant writer of the Classical period found the homoeroticism of Sappho’s poetry sufficiently remarkable to mention it’.²⁶ David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2002, p. 51. Indeed, according to feminist and religious scholar Bernadette Brooten,

at least six playwrights in classical Athens composed comedies entitled ‘Sappho’ … the sparse fragments of these plays that have survived do not, however, present Sappho as sexually involved with women, and one even represents her as having two male lovers.²⁷ Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996, p. 34.

From the time of Augustus onwards, however, Halperin reminds us, ‘Sappho and Lesbos could be associated at times with certain aspects of female same-sex love and desire, with certain female same-sex practices, and with certain forms of female sex and gender deviance’.²⁸ Halperin, How To Do the History of Homosexuality, p. 51. The literature on Sappho is vast. A good recent summary is provided by Maarit Kivilo, Early Greek Poets’ Lives: The Shaping of the Tradition, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2010, pp. 167–200.

This may reflect the new openness about human sexuality that seems to have characterised social life in the Roman Empire, which became the dominant governing force in the ancient world from the first century BCE to the mid-fifth century CE. What is striking, in switching from reading ancient Greek texts to those composed during the height of Imperial Rome, is the very casualness with which multiple facets of human sexuality are represented in the latter period.

The epic poem Aeneid, composed by Virgil (also spelled Vergil) in 29–19 BCE and set at the end of the Trojan War, continued on from Homer’s Iliad. In Virgil’s tale the reader is told about the Trojan warrior Nisus and his younger boyfriend Euryalus, whose devotion to one another, even to the death in bat­tle, parallels that of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. There is also passing reference in Virgil’s text to another same-sex attracted warrior, Cydon, with these homoerotic preferences presented by the Roman poet as matter-of-fact. An early biography of Virgil, traditionally ascribed to Suetonius (69 – after 122 CE), states that Virgil himself was ‘libidinis in pueros pronioris’ (especially attracted to boys) while also having affairs with women; while in the late first century CE the Roman epigrammatist Martial satirised the whole Aeneid as having been inspired by its author having tasted the lips of one of Virgil’s young male companions.²⁹ Suetonius, ‘The Life of Vergil’, in Suetonius Vol. II, trans. John Carew Rolfe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and William Heinemann, London, 1968, pp. 466–7. Martial, Book 8: Epigram 56, in Martial: Epigrams. Vol. II, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and William Heinemann, London, 1968, pp. 44–5. See Ellen Oliensiss, ‘Sons and lovers: sexuality and gender in Virgil’s poetry’, in Fiacra Mac Górián & Charles Martindale (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 294–311.

Martial himself was the author of, in the words of the language and sexuality historian Gary Simes, an ‘account of the sexual doings and habits of Flavian Rome [69–96 CE] that … is the most detailed, the most nuanced of any period in history before our own’. Martial’s works, Simes continues, ‘leave us in little doubt that his primary sexual orientation was homosexual; he responded to male beauty, and desired the affectionate company and attentions of and sex with younger men, though he speaks of occasional encounters with women’.³⁰ Gary Simes, ‘Entry on Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) (c. 39–41 to c. 104)’, in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon eds., Who’s Who in Gay & Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 300. Martial historian and biographer J. P. Sullivan has noted:

In examining Martial’s sexual preoccupations as exhibited in his work, it is obvious that Martial shares the standard Roman assumption that almost all males do not naturally differentiate as regards the sex of their partners (or victims) … The ready availability of charming slaves of both sexes would culturally reinforce these tendencies, as would the influence of Greek ideas in upper-class Roman society, and the phallocentric outlook of the Roman male.³¹ J. P. Sullivan, Martial: The Unexpected Classic. A Literary and Historical Study, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 186.

Sullivan’s reference to ‘victims’ here is a reminder of the exploitative nature of Roman society, in which, as Classical historian John Pollini has put it,

in ancient Rome … it was legal and generally socially acceptable for an adult Roman male to have homosexual relations with another male, whatever his age, provided that, first, the other male was a slave, freedman, foreigner, or male prostitute (who would have been a slave, foreigner, or former Roman citizen), and, second, the Roman male citizen was the active, not the passive, sexual partner in the relationship.³³ John Pollini, ‘The Warren Cup: homoerotic love and Symposial rhetoric in silver’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 1, March 1999, pp. 22–3.

Writing in the age of Julius Caesar, the Roman poet Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) penned extraordinary lyrics of love and hate to his girlfriend Lesbia, while addressing albeit fewer, but no less passionate, verses to a faithless boyfriend Iuventius. This sexual impartiality disturbed pre-gay-liberation era scholars, reflecting what Polloni has dubbed ‘the inability of modern society – not to men­tion earlier twentieth-century scholarship – to deal with subjects of a homosexual or homoerotic nature’.³³ ibid., p. 21. Peter Whigham, whose 1966 translation of Catullus’s poetry introduced his work to generations of readers, was clearly bothered by the fact that ‘on many occasions, in moments of intense emotion, Catullus expressed his feelings in the guise of a woman’. Translating Catullus at a time when the American Psychiatric Association still declared homosexuality to be a mental illness (an edict only overturned in 1973), Whigham was perplexed by the Roman poet’s sexual ambivalence:

The fact that homosexuality was not then considered either as a vice, an aberration or a disease, as it is now, is attendant but not cardinal to the point that I wish to make, which is that there was in Catullus a strain of femininity which went deeper than ‘normal’ adherence to the bisexual conventions of his class and time. His Iuventius poems strike exactly the same note as the heterosexual poems.³⁴ Peter Whigham, ‘Introduction’, in The Poems of Catullus, trans. Peter Whigham, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1966, p. 42.

Julius Caesar himself, a notorious womaniser of decidedly effeminate character, was satirised by his own troops, who believed he had a youthful affair with Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, and was dubbed by one of his political rivals ‘omnium mulierum virum et omnium virorum mulierem’ (every woman’s man and every man’s woman).³⁵ Suetonius, ‘The deifed Julius’, in Suetonius. Vol. I, trans. John Carew Rolfe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and William Heinemann, London, 1964, pp. 66–9, 72–3. See, however, Kelly Olson, ‘Masculinity, appearance, and sexuality: dandies in Roman antiquity’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 23, no. 2, May 2014, where she considers ‘instances in which an appearance conventionally held to be effeminate was also linked with youth, urbanity, and even heterosexual activity’ (p. 183) Caesar’s reaction to a poem in which Catullus chided him and his engineer friend Mamurra for their sexual profligacy, calling them ‘improbis cinaedis’ (abominable sodomites) and suggesting that ‘both Mamurra and Caesar are active heterosexually and homosexually as both rivals and sexual partners’ has, extraordinarily, survived.³⁶ Judy K. Deuling, ‘Catullus and Mamurra’, Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, vol. 52, fasc. 2, April 1999, p. 191. For this attack on Julius Caesar and Mamurra, see Poem 57 in Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, trans. Francis Warre Cornish, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and William Heinemann, London, 1966, pp. 64–7. On the meaning of Poem 57, see Lee M. Fratantuono, ‘Nivales Socii: Caesar, Mamurra, and the Snow of Catullus c. 57’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 2010, New Series, vol. 96, no. 3, 2010, pp. 101–10. According to Craig Williams, ‘a cinaedus is a man who fails to live up to traditional standards of masculine deportment, and one way in which he may do so is by seeking to be penetrated; but that is merely a symptom of the deeper disorder, his gender deviance’. Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality. Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1999, p. 175. Williams argues, however, that rather than accusing Caesar and Mamurra of being in a homosexual relationship, in Catullus’s Poem 57 ‘their disease is an unmanly submission to their own uncontrolled desires’ (p. 207). That is, if we can believe the account passed down by Suetonius, writing in the late first century CE:

Valerius Catullus, as Caesar himself did not hesitate to say, inflicted a lasting stain on his name by the verses about Mamurra; yet when he apologized, Caesar invited the poet to dinner that very same day, and continued his usual friendly relations with Catullus’s father.³⁷ Suetonius, ‘The Deifed Julius’, in Suetonius. Vol. I, 1964, pp. 94–5.

While Suetonius may not always be the most reliable of ancient historians, his position as secretary to Roman Emperors Trajan (r. 98–117 CE) and Hadrian (r. 117–138 CE) arguably gave him access to archival sources that no longer sur­vive. From his Lives of the Twelve Caesars we learn snippets of information about the intimate lives of rulers of Rome in the first century CE. There are salacious tales, true, such as the debaucheries of Emperor Caligula (r. 37–41 CE), and the public marriages to two men of Emperor Nero (r. 54–68 CE), Nero playing the groom in one ceremony and the bride in another (events also described by ancient historians Tacitus and Dio Cassius).³⁸ Same-sex marriage between men was, surprisingly, not unknown in ancient Rome. See ‘Appendix 2. Marriage between males’, in Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 1999, pp. 245–52. Then there is Emperor Galba (r. 68–69 CE), an unpopular ruler of whom Suetonius writes, without any negativity, ‘in his sexual tastes he inclined to males, with a decided preference for mature, sturdy men’. This is quoting Robert Graves’s classic translation – readers of John C. Rolfe’s translation, first published in 1914, encountered a more homophobic version of this passage in Suetonius: ‘He was more inclined to unnatural desire, and in gratifying it preferred full-grown, strong men’.³⁹ Galba 22, in Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1979, p. 347. Galba 22, in Suetonius. Vol II, trans. John Carew Rolfe, 1968, pp. 224–5.

Readers of Suetonius in his own time would arguably have been no more startled by this than by perusing contemporaneous novels by Petronius or Xenophon of Ephesus, whose narratives imaged a world quite different from today, the liberality of which (for men at any rate in that patriarchal society) has been summarised by scholar of Roman homosexuality Craig A. Williams:

Ancient Romans lived in a cultural environment in which married men could enjoy sexual relations with their male slaves without fear of criticism from their peers; in which adultery generally aroused more concern than pederasty; in which men notorious for their womanizing might be called effeminate, while a man whose masculinity had been impugned could cite as proof of his manhood the fact that he had engaged in sexual relations with his accuser’s sons; in which men who sought to be sexually penetrated by other men were subjected to teasing and ridicule, but were also thought quite capable of being adulterers. These scenarios highlight some obvious differences between ancient and modern ideologies of masculine sexual behavior.⁴⁰ Williams, p. 3.

Even male prostitution (for male clients) was as common as female (documented at the Lupanare brothel in Pompeii, for example); both were greeted with ‘moral indifference’ by contemporary Roman society and taxed by emperor Caligula at ‘the price of one copulation a day for each worker’.⁴¹ Emidio De Albentiis, Secrets of Pompeii. Everyday Life in Ancient Rome, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2009, pp. 137–8.

In the surviving sections of Petronius’s Satyricon, generally believed to have been composed during the reign of Emperor Nero (r. 54–68 CE), we follow the exploits and (often libidinous) excesses of the former gladiator Encolpius, his adolescent boyfriend Giton, and another man, Ascyltus (who also seduces Giton). All sorts of sexual antics take place within the narrative, among which the three-way relationship between the central male characters is presented as just another variant in social interaction. A classic example is provided in the last section of the text that survives intact, in which a beautiful woman, Circe, attempts to woo Encolpius with frank speech:

If you don’t find a lady distasteful, one who had a man for the first time only this year, let me recommend myself as your girl­friend, young man. Of course, you have a boy-friend too – I wasn’t ashamed of making enquiries, you see – but what’s to stop you adopting a girl-friend as well?⁴² Satyricon 127, in Petronius: The Satyricon and Seneca: the Apocolocyntosis, trans. J. P. Sullivan, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977, p. 144. Male-to¬male afection is only one element of Petronius’s satirical romance. Christopher Gill has summarised the Satyricon’s ‘sheer choice of sexual combinations: a eunuch attempting sexual assault on a man (23–24), an attempted seduction of a young man by a girl ending in impotence (126 f.), a love triangle involving male homosexuals (9–11 and elsewhere), a courtesan sampling a young boy, and then arranging a union between the boy and a pre-pubertal girl (24–26), and so on.’ Christopher Gill, ‘The sexual episodes in the Satyricon’, Classical Philology, vol. 68, no. 3, July 1973, p. 177.

Written towards the end of the second century CE, the Ἐφεσιακά or Ephesian Story by Xenophon of Ephesus, is a Greek novel of the late Classical period, the ‘obvious attraction’ of which, according to one of its translators, ‘is that it tells a very exciting, if rather tall, story in terms which bring the ancient world to life far more vividly than the more stylized productions of Classical Greek literature’.⁴³ Paul Turner, ‘Introduction’, in The Ephesian Story by Xenophon of Ephesus, trans. Paul Turner, The Golden Cockerel Press, London, 1957, p. 6. At the tale’s heart is the story of star-crossed young lovers, the impossibly handsome Habrocomes and his exquisite girlfriend Anthia, who endure slavery at the hands of pirates, separation, torture and imprisonment before finally being reunited. Along the way they encounter a cast of colourful characters, including the same-sex-attracted pirate Corymbus (whose advances Habrocomes rejects) and the avowedly homosexual robber Hippothous, who tells Habrocomes the heartbreaking story of his love affair with a boyfriend who subsequently drowned. Habrocomes non-judgmentally befriends Hippothous, who takes a new boyfriend at the novel’s end. ‘At last they went to bed’, the Ephesian Story concludes, ‘Hippothous with Clisthenes, the beautiful boy from Sicily, and Habrocomes with Anthia’.⁴⁴ ibid., p. 60.

Neither the Satyricon or the Ephesian Story present a world in which, quite frankly, anyone today would want to live – their protagonists are thieves and murderers whose adventures unfold against a backdrop of slavery, crucifixion, shipwreck, torture and general moral corruption. But, within their imperfect worlds, the almost prosaic non-heteronormative sexuality of their central char­acters stands out as something quite exceptional in Western literature prior to the advent of gay-liberation politics; as straightforward as the decision made by the producers of the 2018 BBC One and Netflix television series Troy: Fall of a City to present Achilles and Patroclus, unashamedly, as lovers.

Ted Gott is Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria.

This essay was originally published in QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection.

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