Was Alexander the Great Gay? What the Historians Say

Yet another Netflix documentary on the ancient world has proven controversial, this time with the depiction of Alexander the Great as gay.

In the opening episode of “Alexander: The Making of a God,” which started airing on Netflix on January 31, Alexander, played by Buck Braithwaite, kisses his friend Hephaestion on the mouth and body, as they engage in an intimate embrace.

8 minutes into the new Alexander the Great Netflix series and they already managed to make him gay pic.twitter.com/ebC0auclaC

— Trust Fund Terry (@trustfundterry) February 2, 2024

The portrayal of the ancient Macedonian king as a homosexual has generated angry responses from some viewers who feel that the documentary is distorting history. Meanwhile, The new Netflix series promises to reveal the “extraordinary life of Alexander the Great,” per the official synopsis, but how accurate are the claims surrounding the sexuality of history’s greatest conquerer?

Ongoing Controversy: Alexander the Great’s Gay Representations

This is not the first time that Alexander the Great’s sexuality has caused controversy. Director Oliver Stone’s 2004 depiction of the Macedonian king as homosexual in the movie “Alexander” was similarly divisive.

On one end of the spectrum, various gay rights activists and LGBTQ websites praise Alexander the Great as an iconic “gay hero”. On the opposite end of that spectrum, a riot erupted in Thessaloniki in 2002, during a historical symposium on Alexander’s sexuality, requiring a police force of forty to protect the delegates.

The fact that a historical figure’s sexuality is a point of such intense controversy some 2,347 years after their death certainly complicates objective efforts to get to the bottom of the matter.

Sexuality in Ancient Greece

Before we can even begin to answer whether Alexander the Great was gay, we need to consider the social and historical context. This is because contemporary conceptions of sexuality would be an anathema to the ancient Greeks.

Whereas today, sexual identities such as “gay”, “lesbian”, or “straight” are assigned to people based on the genders of those they are attracted to, the ancient Greeks (and Romans) believed that sexuality was defined by the role one played during an intimate act.

As Ruth Mazo Karras writes in an academic paper for the American Historical Review, the Greeks and Romans “categorized sexual behaviors or identities not by the gender of the participants but by the sexual role each played.”

“Key to the distinction of gender roles was the concept that men are active and women passive, or that men are penetrators and women penetrated,” Karras continues. “Thus anyone who is penetrated (or is in other ways passive) is gendered feminine, and anyone who penetrates is masculine.”

Therein lies the first difficulty we encounter in trying to answer this question. The way Alexander and his contemporaries would have viewed sexual orientation would have been vastly different from how we view it today. The question itself is therefore anachronistic.

Alleged gay lovers of Alexander the Great

With that being said, we can examine the evidence as to whether Alexander had male lovers. This is again, a matter of intense debate between historians, who are certainly not immune to their own biases.

The most famous of Alexander’s alleged male lovers is Hephaestion, his boyhood friend who would accompany him on his campaigns until the latter died in 324 BC.

Another is Bagoas, a eunuch in the court of the Persian Empire with whom Alexander is said to have had amorous encounters.

Ancient sources

The main difficulty with establishing the historicity of these alleged lovers is the range of sources available. As Maggie Jonsson explains in the Wittenberg History Journal, “no primary sources remain. Therefore, all the information obtained by modern scholars has to come from secondary and tertiary sources that may have had access to these initial sources.”

Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Justin, and Aelius wrote the main ancient texts on Alexander’s life. However, these writers were not contemporaries of Alexander.

The evidence for a romance between Alexander and Hephaestion is inferential. According to the ancient sources, Alexander was overwhelmed with grief when Hephaestion died. For instance, Arrian wrote that Alexander “flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his Companions.”

Some modern historians infer that Alexander’s grief over the death of Hephaestion is evidence that they were in a romantic relationship. Although this is possible, this inference is not strong enough to act as conclusive evidence and is essentially a matter of conjecture.

Bagoas is mentioned by Dicaearchus, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, and Athenaeus. The implied homosexuality is less ambiguous in these sources. According to Rufus, Bagoas had previously been “intimate” with the Persian king Darius and was then “intimate with Alexander after his conquest.

In The Parallel Lives, Plutarch claims that “[Alexander’s] favorite, Bagoas, won the prize for song and dance, and then, all in his festal array, passed through the theatre and took his seat by Alexander’s side; at sight of which the Macedonians clapped their hands and loudly bade the king kiss the victor, until at last he threw his arms about him and kissed him tenderly.”

There is some debate concerning the historicity of Bagoas, given his mention by some of the sources and not others. For example, W. W. Tarn’s work dismisses Bagoas as an invention of Dicaearchus, whereas E. Badian argues that he was a real historical figure.

What do modern historians think?

Some historians have argued very ardently one way or another over Alexander’s sexuality. For example, English author W. W. Tarn outright dismisses the notion that Alexander was gay, writing that “There is then not one scrap of evidence for calling Alexander homosexual.” However, Tarn’s argument is sometimes dismissed by other historians who argue that his Victorian outlook was biased.

Mary Renault offers the opposite argument in her biography of Alexander, paying particular attention to his relationship with Bagoas, claiming that Alexander held a lifelong attachment to him. However, Renault has also been accused of bias, owing to her views on sexuality and status as an openly lesbian writer of historical fiction.

Of course, a multitude of other historians have offered their views. Robin Lane Fox argues that Alexander may have been gay, whereas historians Peter Green and Daniel Ogden take a more neutral stance.

Alexander the Great’s wives and lovers

Generally, we know much more about the romantic relationships Alexander had with various women, even if mentions of these are likewise relatively scant in the ancient sources.

Alexander had three wives: Roxana, Stateira (sometimes called Barsine), and Parysatis II. According to Aristobulus, Alexander married Stateira and Parysatis at the same time during the Susa Weddings in 324 BC, whilst already being married to Roxana.

Interestingly, Alexander is said to have presented Drypetis to Hephaestion, who happened to be the daughter of Darius and the sister of his own wife. The intention was for Hephaestion’s offspring to be regarded as his own nephews and nieces.

Alexander the Great had one legitimate child, a son named Alexander IV of Macedon who was born in 323 BC to his wife Roxana, shortly after Alexander’s death.

Alexander is also said to have had other women lovers. Thaïs, initially known as the lover of Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander’s close companions, may have had a romantic relationship with Alexander himself.

Athenaeus’s mention of Alexander enjoying Thaïs’s company may suggest more than friendship, given her reputed wit and entertainment. However, this is again the kind of inferential evidence that is thrown around to support a romantic relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion. Following Alexander’s death, Ptolemy married Thaïs, who later became the mother of three of his children and potentially ascended to the role of Queen of Egypt.