The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Mary Renault Book Discussion
injest:
hi Kerry!
you promised a description of Hephaistion from "The Nature of Alexander"!!
I ranked her books last night and realized I had left off the Theseus books!! :P
delalluvia:
--- Quote from: injest on December 30, 2006, 09:08:01 pm ---hi Kerry!
you promised a description of Hephaistion from "The Nature of Alexander"!!
--- End quote ---
Was there one, Kerry? I don't recall. Just the basic 'he was taller, better looking' and I think the color of his hair was mentioned. About it.
Kerry:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on December 30, 2006, 02:11:49 pm ---Alexander's appetitie for Bagoas/boys didn't fade throughout his life, why should his desire for Hephaestion fade either, especially with love as its basis and the oft commented fact that Hephaestion was one of the best looking men around?
Since Renault carried over the same characters into 'The Persian Boy', I find I have a lot of sympathy for how Renault's Hephaestion must have felt to see Alexander - the man he is deeply in love with and always desired - suddenly discover he likes sex a lot, enough to have a 'boy' live in his tent with him - leaving Hephaestion out in the cold.
I imagine the rejection and constant heartbreak of Hephaestion must have felt whenever I read 'The Persian Boy', so it's not one of my favorites.
--- End quote ---
When we look back at the ancient world, it is very important to remember that it is an era that existed long before our present Christian era, with all its moral hang-ups and prudery. Alexander, Hephaestion and Bagoas were men of their times, not ours. As for Bagoas being a "boy," it is my understanding that he was a "youth" when he met Alexander, not a child. I can find no evidence that Alexander had any relationships with "boys." In this, he was proudly Macedonian, not Athenian! His preference seems to be for handsome young men and women, probably in that order (LOL). The belief of the day was that men were for love and women were for babies (i.e., to father children by). Though this sounds chauvinistic and sexist when viewed through our "civilized" (hey, let's not try to define that term LOL), rose-tinted glasses, it was all that they knew and not unusual to them in the least. As for Hephaestion, I believe Alexander never ceased to love him. This can be proved by the way he mourned and deified him following his death. And by the "nervous breakdown" he experience following Hephaestion's death, which ultimately led to his own death. Why did Alexander "cheat on" Hephaestion? Again, we are here arrogantly and inappropriately applying our own modern moral code onto an ancient people. Alexander was the King. He did it "because he could." It's that simple! Hephaestion would have known and understood this, and loved Alexander no less because of it.
injest:
according to the book Bagoas was sixteen...
Kerry:
From Mary Renault’s “The Nature of Alexander”:
He (Hephaestion) is described by Curtius as being taller than Alexander, and better looking, in which case he was certainly handsome. No historian states plainly whether they were physically lovers; but Plutarch says that on the site of Troy, Alexander laid a wreath on Achilles’ tomb, and Hephaestion on Patroclus’. In spite of Homer’s reticence, classical Greece assumed the heroes’ love to be sexual. It would be characteristic of Alexander’s passion for personal loyalties to make so public an avowal. Olympias, at any rate, was wildly jealous of their attachment and railed by letter at Hephaestion half across Asia. A fragmentary retort of his survived: “Stop quarrelling with me; not that in any case I shall much care. You know Alexander means more to me than anyone.”
And this regarding the famous faux pas of the Persian Queen Mother, Sisygambis, gives us another insight into Hephaestion‘s handsome, noble bearing:
Arrian admits that the event has accumulated legend. He, Curtius and Plutarch vary only slightly, and all to the same effect. Alexander brought Hephaestion with him. They walked in together, both simply dressed. Hephaestion’s looks and presence first struck the women, used to associate height with royalty, and the venerable Sisygambis began to prostrate herself before him (Hephaestion). He drew back; the harem eunuchs made warning signs; in distress she began again with the King (Alexander). He (Alexander) stepped forward and raised her up. “Never mind, Mother. You made no mistake, he too is Alexander.” Mystifying as this may have seemed when passed through an interpreter, she thanked him with regal dignity.
And this description of Alexander is quite striking:
Alexander’s reign began in 336BC. He was little over twenty.
“His physical looks are best portrayed in the statues Lysippus made of him. (Plutarch does not divulge which of Alexander’s own contemporaries, if any, expressed this view.) And he approved being sculpted by him alone. (But he must have licensed a number of others.) For this artist has caught exactly those idiosyncrasies which many of his successors and friends later tried to imitate - the pose of his neck, tilted a little leftward, and his liquid eyes. Apelles’ painting, ‘The Thunder-Wielder,’ did not get his complexion right, but made it too dark and tanned; for he was blond, they say, shading to ruddy on the breast and face.”
His liquid eyes were grey. Their expressiveness altered Greek artistic convention. All important portrait heads feature a heavy bulge of the forehead above the brows (allowing for idealization, probably even more marked in life), caused perhaps by the development of the frontal lobes of the brain; and the loosely waving, heavy mane of hair, springing from the peak, its individual cut sloped down to the base of the neck when in south Greece the short curly crop was in fashion. Arrian, both of whose main sources were men who saw him often, says that he was very handsome.
In Aristoxenus’ memoir it is said that a very pleasant scent came from his skin, and that there was a fragrance in his breath and all his body which permeated the clothes he wore.
LOL
Kerry
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