Alexander the Great (5 page)

So it was for most Greeks of the upper classes and many Macedonians, too. It was a homoerotic world wherein gay lovers caught each other’s eyes.

The only anomaly in the case of Alexander and Hephaestion was that the two lovers were of approximately the same age. Most aristocratic Greeks preferred young boys of around eleven or twelve. They adopted and educated these
ephebes
, training them in music and oratory. Each Greek aristocrat had his favorite boy, but Alexander was different. Though he had plenty of
ephebes
, Hephaestion was his preferred lover. Hephaestion was a military man and a general of at least the second rank. Alexander often dispatched him to deal with military matters, sometimes far away, but the two lovers always remained loyal to each other. They were bound by more than just sex.

Alexander must have viewed Hephaestion as almost an alter ego. On one occasion in Darius’s court, Darius’s mother confused the two men, and apparently believing that the taller and more aristocratic-looking of the two was Alexander, addressed Hephaestion as Alexander. When her error was pointed out to her, she was extremely embarrassed and apologized profusely. Alexander responded, “Your confusion over the name is unimportant, for this man is also Alexander.”
⁷

When Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion ended after two decades, owing to the latter’s death, Alexander grieved deeply. Two writers of antiquity describe Alexander’s actions after Hephaestion’s death. Aelian (a Roman author of the late second and early third centuries AD, who wrote in Greek) says that Alexander hurled arms onto the funeral pyre, melting down gold and silver and burning expensive clothing along with the body. He sheared off his hair, emulating Achilles’ grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. According to Arrian (a Greek from Bithynia who became a Roman citizen during the reign of Hadrian), he spent all day and all night prostrate beside the corpse, and others said he hanged the doctor who attended his friend for giving him the wrong medicine.
^{8
Alexander planned to build a huge monument to his friend and lover, a project that was scrapped when he himself died. The violence of his grief over Hephaestion’s death possibly contributed to Alexander’s own premature death.}

Why were the Greeks bisexual, with a strong proclivity to homosexuality, preferring usually boys and sometimes cohabiting with other adult males? One could make the argument that homosexuality was a traditional, long-standing condition of human males, practiced in antiquity not only by the Greeks but also by the Romans. There was no social stigma attached to the homosexual relationship. As long as the man did his familial duty and begot children, he was left alone to pursue whatever extramarital relationships he wanted. There was no AIDS in those days, and many Greek men viewed their wives only as breeding sows. It was only around AD 400, with the triumph of the Christian Church, that a revolution in gender relationships occurred.

The Christian bishops and priests wanted to stress the unit of the intergendered family and community. They wanted also to give an enhanced dignity to women, hitherto so badly treated in the Greco-Roman world, because women made up more than half of the membership of the church. Furthermore, at a time of drastically declining population in the early Middle Ages, the bishops and priests sought to foster heterosexual copulation.

Another way of looking at Greek homosexuality is to see it as following from the rigorous training in military life, which in turn fostered gay relationships. As is seen in the populations of jails today, men in close proximity to other men, with little recourse to female company, will frequently seek out homosexual relationships.

The impact of homosexuality on the birthrate in some societies was drastic. In Sparta in the fourth century BC the personnel of the army declined from 10,000 to 1,000 available soldiers. Homosexuality was responsible for at least part of this decline. In sixteenth-century Persia, where homosexuality was also increasingly practiced, there was a sharp decline in population.

A prominent and pioneering biographer of Alexander, W. W. Tarn, while denying that Alexander was homosexual, said that he loved no woman except his “terrible mother,” Olympias. Alexander’s relationship with his father and mother can be understood only in Freudian terms. Tarn never met Freud or came under his influence; thus he did not have an opportunity to understand the full dimensions of Alexander’s personality. This attitude was, however, very common among British academics during and after World War I: They fled from psychoanalytic models.

Philip trusted Alexander to the extent of making him regent in his absence during the Byzantine campaign. While his father was away, a rebellion broke out in the north, and Alexander (then only sixteen) marched north to Maedi (a wild region of modern-day Bulgaria), conquered the city, and made it into a new place he called Alexandropolis, the first of many cities he would name after himself. Having possession of the Macedonian Great Seal gave him the right to do this, but it also indicates that his burgeoning ambition might pose a threat to his father. Philip was still vigorous and in the prime of his life. Nevertheless, he wrote to Alexander regularly, giving advice and occasional admonitions if he thought his son was doing something wrong.

In the last two years of Philip’s life, however, Alexander, the presumptive heir to the throne, fell out of favor. The causes of this are complicated and open to conjecture. Philip, seeming to give new meaning to the adage “There’s no fool like an old fool,” fell madly in love with a much younger woman, Cleopatra. There had never been any hostilities surrounding his taking of other wives, but this time Philip repudiated Olympias on charges of adultery and implied that Alexander was illegitimate. The wedding feast was not a happy occasion for Alexander and Olympias. Green describes the confrontation:

Since Philip had raised Alexander to be his heir, followed his training and education closely, and appointed him regent in his absence, it is curious that he would antagonize Alexander at this point in his life. It has never been proved conclusively that Alexander wanted to usurp his father’s throne, although his mother had always encouraged him to be his own man and had always taken his side in battles between father and son. There was a natural rivalry, and now that Philip was getting ready to invade the Persian Empire, Alexander felt that his father would get the glory that should have been his. After all, he was the reincarnation of Achilles. Perhaps, as with many royal heirs, Alexander was openly showing too much impatience about gaining the throne from the long-lived Philip.

When the new queen, Cleopatra, was delivered of her child some months later, however, it was a girl. Philip must have believed that he could not leave the country without an heir in place and with Alexander dangerous and discontented in exile. On her part Olympias was fomenting rebellion at her brother’s court in Epirus, so Philip, always a pragmatist, recalled Alexander from his exile and reinstated him as his heir, but by then Cleopatra was pregnant a second time.

Receiving the news that his brother-in-law in Epirus was planning an invasion of Macedonia, Philip, in his usual fashion, proposed a marriage between Olympias’s brother and her daughter, also named Cleopatra. Although this was an incestuous relationship, it was approved nevertheless, and the wedding was set to take place in June.

Shortly before the wedding, Philip’s wife, Cleopatra, again gave birth, this time to a son. If Olympias and Alexander were going to do anything about the succession, now was the time.

Philip and his court were celebrating the wedding of one of his daughters when he was attacked with a short sword by a minor courtier. Green describes the assassination:

Philip’s assassin was a man named Pausanias, who according to some sources had been Philip’s lover several years before. Philip had broken off the relationship and had turned to another lover. There was a great scandal in the court about this sordid affair, and Attalus, whose niece Philip had married, decided to take matters into his own hands. He invited Pausanias to a banquet, got him drunk, and then he and his guests gang-raped the young man. Pausanias went to Philip asking for his help, but because of the alliance with Attalus, Philip was slow to do anything about it, so the brooding courtier exacted his revenge by killing the king. The other explanation is that the murder was arranged by Philip’s wife—Alexander’s mother, Olympias—and by Alexander himself because they were concerned about whether Alexander would actually gain the throne before Philip disinherited him.

The two scenarios of Philip’s death—assassination by an aggrieved ex-lover and complicity by Olympias and Alexander in a plot to kill him—are not mutually exclusive. The sexually abused courtier who did the terrible deed could have been put up to it by Olympias and Alexander. The three courtiers who assaulted Pausanias were friends of Alexander’s and could easily have been enticed to kill Philip, through bribes of either money or position in Alexander’s new government. That they were responsible for Pausanias’s death gives credence to the idea that they put him up to the murder and then killed him so that he could not talk.

Alexander’s relationship with his father and mother involved the classic paradigm of an Oedipus complex. His father was a bold, aggressive, successful, and sexy man. His mother was equally bold, aggressive, and sexy, and she doted on her son. Lest it be thought that Freud’s Oedipus complex was unknown in the ancient world, Sophocles sketched the essential Oedipal paradigm in his play
Oedipus the King,
from which tragedy Freud derived both the paradigm and the appellation.

It is true that Sophocles’ King Oedipus inadvertently and unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. But given the push of unconscious drives, the difference between Alexander and Oedipus is small. It was hubris, in this instance the arrogance of negligence, that, according to Sophocles, drove the king to kill his father and marry his mother.

In Alexander’s case he came to fear and hate his father and possibly became involved in a plot to kill him. He was so sexually attracted to his mother that he fled from her presence. Beneath Sophocles’ depiction of reckless hubris on the part of Oedipus, there lies a sexual triangle embedded in the unconscious, and that is the way the drama is often presented today.

An ambience of thick sexuality, and ultimately of patricide, certainly surrounds this family—Philip, Olympias, and Alexander. It pressed explosively upon them.

We can only imagine the psychological pressures the young Alexander was under. He had a very strong father who raised and educated him to be heir to the throne, then appeared to reject him, at least temporarily. He had a mother who cohabited with snakes and then suffocated her son with love. Killing his father and making love to his mother were probably images that flickered through his conscious mind and were more prevalent deep in his unconscious.

Alexander rid himself of both his father and his mother and thereby resolved his Oedipal problem. Only then was he—independent of his parents’ oppressive shadows—able to indulge his reckless bravery and achieve the satisfactions of world conquest.

Alexander’s sex life and sexual proclivities have always been the subject of much conjecture. From one era to another his homosexual behavior has been alternately ignored and accepted. What should be remembered again is that homosexual liaisons were common, even accepted, in ancient Greece and Rome.

Plutarch relates an interesting anecdote about Alexander’s sexual attitudes: