I grew up north of Hadrian’s Wall, but just south of the more short-lived Antonine Wall that bisects modern Glasgow and Edinburgh. Our school trips were couched in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Our historical sense of time and place moulded by Hadrian, who managed the Empire from the era of its greatest extent, and left a rocky ruin across the Scottish lowlands. But on our doorstep too were the ghosts of the Fall. Viking settlements that spurred the Celtic Gaels and warring Picts to unite and form modern Scotland. The battlefields of Bannockburn and Stirling Bridge, monuments to a nation which longed for recognition from the Pontifex Maximus down in Rome. These memories were our day trips and family outings.
Growing up Scottish is to live between two walls of history. The glorious past and the crumbling present. Growing up gay is similar, but the other way around. The ‘gay’ past haunts us like a spectre, shadows of persecution and disease run sharp but invisible nails up our spine, so we cling to the ‘it gets better’ we hope will come to pass.
Maybe it will or it won’t get better, no one knows the future. But we know the past, or at least, we have the facts. How the facts are presented rests on perspective. Living north of the Wall and looking south offers a different narrative than those who spent their formative years south. That’s why, a thousand years later, Scotland as a nation still endures. It’s why, two thousand years later, Roman institutions like the Pontifex Maximus, an office once held by Julius Caesar, are alive and kicking down in Rome. Yet the gay history of Rome was never discussed on our school trips. In fact, Rome's gay history, and gay emperors, have often been deliberately hidden from us. But history belongs to us all. We as LGBTQ people, deserve to know what our ancestors accomplished, good, bad and evil.
Julius Caesar: Queen of Bithynia
Julius Caesar, who turned a Mediterranean republic into an enduring Empire, was swallowed in gay scandal and innuendo that stalked him throughout his life, right up to his assassination in 44 BCE. Brushed over by most modern scholars, the insinuation that Caesar had been in a relationship, and been the bottom, for King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, a once independent kingdom stretching along the northern coast of modern Turkey that became a Roman client state and later province of the Empire.
The story goes that around 80 BCE, Caesar, as a young officer in the staff of Praetor Marcus Minucius Thermus, was sent to solicit military support from Nicomedes IV. The historian Suetonias reports that Caesar spent so long at the Bithynian court, where he successfully procured military aid from the Bithynian king, that rumours abounded of Caesar bottoming for the king. Roman traders and merchants were reported as witnessing the twenty-year-old Caesar lounging about with Nicomedes in his palace, and Caesar was supposedly seen going into the King’s bedroom
The allegation of being a bottom was frequently used against young Roman men, being a ‘pretty-boy Jason’ was an insult designed to spear up and coming Romans and sully their reputation with a cloud of scandal.
To say Caesar had many enemies in his life is an understatement, but is there smoke with no fire? Hard evidence of Caesar having had a gay relationship doesn’t exist, but we do know what contemporary Romans thought of the allegation.
Cicero, one of Caesar’s fiercest critics in the senate, dismissed the benefits the Republic had received from Nicomedes by saying: “we all know what he gave you and what you gave him in return.”
A consul, Gaius Scribonius Curio, called Casersar “every man’s wife and every woman’s husband," while Octavian, Caesar’s self-appointed heir, addressed first triumvir Pompey as ‘king’ and Caesar as ‘queen.’ Even Caesar’s own Gallic army sang songs saying “Caesar conquered Gaul, but Nicomedes conquered Caesar.”
Caesar denied the allegations under oath, but the rumours were repeated not just by Cicero, but other leading Romans of the late Republic, including poet Licinius Calvus, senator and consul Gaius Memmius, and another of Caesar's allies turned enemies, Marcus Bibulus.
Suetonius also reports that after Caesar’s death, ally Marc Anthony accused his adopted son Octavian of sleeping with Caesar to become his heir, although it’s questionable whether or not Suetonius himself even took this accusation seriously.
So does this mean Caesar had a gay relationship? Or, perhaps more relevant a question, does it even matter? After all, we must consider Roman sexuality within its Roman context. It was normal to have sexual relations with other men; slaves, prostitutes, or other non-citizens. The issue for Romans, unlike for the Greeks, was whether or not the man was a bottom, or a top.
In Classical Greece, the institution of pederasty made it socially acceptable for citizen-level male youths to bottom for older men. Roman sexuality scholar Craig Williams notes this wasn’t the case in Rome. Being penetrated was incompatible with being a male Roman citizen.
In fact, having too much sex with men or women had the same negative connotations with bottoming. Extravagance of any sort was intensely policed, at least in the Republican era. Men were supposed to conduct themselves with Roman virtues, the sort which had beaten back Carthage and conquered Italy. Frugal and conservative; a citizen-soldiery that fought for Roman honour, not personal glory.
Whether those qualities had ever been truly present in the early Republic is another matter, but those were the virtues the conservative elements of the Roman aristocracy in the late Republic held high, and those were the virtues seemingly rode roughshod over by Julius Caesar. He pushed against the conservative elites and enacted hugely controversial land reforms, extended citizenship to many parts of the growing Empire, and essentially caused a political crisis in the republic because he wanted to keep on wearing the swishy purple robes reserved for triumph ceremonies, and a cute little laurel wreath he demanded to keep on his head against protocol.
Perhaps another perspective is not whether we can claim Caesar as a queer, but what his modern hyper-masculinisation says about how historians have decoupled the idea of same-sex attraction with leadership and power.
Assigning modern labels to historical figures is always fraught with complications. But whether or not Julius Caesar ever had a sexual relationshi
p with the King of Bithynia, or indeed anyone else, is perhaps besides the point. Because Caesar fits a historical archetype that we do know very well. The sexually fluid ‘great man.’
Alexander The Great, King James I and VI, Frederick the Great, even Napoleon were men obsessed with flashy ceremony who remade the world in their image while having well documented same sex relationships. When imagining Caesar through this lens, it's hard to envision a man who wouldn't bend over backwards for a king to secure a much needed fleet.
Plutarch too compared Caesar, not unfavourably, with Alexander the Great. Suetonius reports that Caesar dressed effeminate compared to his peers, and plucked all the hair from his body. Caesar, angered and annoyed by the allegations of what had happened with Nicomedes in the Bithynian Court, was never truly free from the rumours. We don’t have any Bithynian sources to review, but we do know that upon his death in 74 BCE, King Nicomedes IV bequeathed his entire kingdom to the people of Rome.
Whether Caesar can be classed as having same sex attraction, beyond the same sex acts which were not uncommon in the era, wi
ll always be debatable. But if he did have a sexual relationship with Nicomedes, then for the king at least, it was certainly a memorable one.
Bithynia, as it happens, is the scene of the next great gay tale of Roman history nearly 200 years later. By this time, Bithynia was a Roman province fully integrated into the Empire which stretched from the soon-to-be-built wall in northern England, to modern Portugal, North Africa, and the banks of Babylon on the Euphrates river.
Trajan: devoted to wine and boys
Hadrian would come to be Emperor after being adopted by Trajan, the man who had led the Empire to its absolute greatest extent by the time of his death in 117 CE. Both Trajan and Hadrian were undeniably gay. There was a harem of good-looking teen boys at court whom Trajan and Hadrian often fought over.
Clearly the imbalance between a pubescent teenage boy and the emperor of Rome at its most powerful is beyond imaginable, and it would be wrong to consider Trajan at least as having anything that could be described as a gay relationship. Indeed, Trajan’s behaviour borders on the predatory, although Cassius Dio writes that: “I know, of course, that he [Trajan] was devoted to boys and to wine… however, he drank all the wine he wanted, yet remained sober, and in his relation with boys he harmed no one.”
Be that as it may, the boys in question were played like pawns. Abgar VII was the king of Edessa, a small independent state in between Rome and their powerful rivals Parthia. Relations had become frosty between Abgar and Trajan, so Agbar sent his son Arbandes, “handsome and in the prime of youth and therefore in favour with Trajan,” so says Cassius Dio, to “perform some barbaric dance or other” for Trajan during a feast. Trajan was apparently delighted with the boy, and especially his gold earrings.
The move worked, for a time. Although by the end of Trajan’s reign, Abgar supported the Parthians in a revolt. Edessa was sacked and Abgar killed. Hadrian later appointed Abgar’s brother Ma’nu VII to become a client king, before Edessa was fully incorporated as a Roman province in 212 CE.
Antinous: the Emperor’s lover and Roman God
Hadrian is the daddy bear of Roman emperors, if that daddy also brutally suppressed frequent revolts in Judea and enslaved countless tribes. He’s often ranked as one of Rome’s greatest emperors, meaning the contribution he made to the stability and longevity of the polity is ranked highly by historians both ancient and modern.
Greatest is a difficult word in this context. It implies a positivity, in both the concept of imperium, and the concept of Rome, that comes to us from early modern scholars, as well as the nation-centric point of view of our age. Is a nation or an empire a good thing? In some ways, polities can provide stability and safety to some, if not most, of the people who dwell within it. But polities also tend to crush those who live outside it.
It might be more objective to say Rome is significant. Roman history has had and continues to have a significant impact on historiography, and Hadrian was certainly one of the most significant rulers of Rome, and by extension the ancient world.
What is glossed over in the history though, is the hugely significant role a young Bithynian boy named Antinous played, not just in the life of Hadrian, but in the lasting culture of the Empire.
We have more statues of Antinous than perhaps any other ancient figure minus the first emperor Augustus, and Hadrian himself. These statues share the same features; “a broad, swelling chest, a head of tousled curls, and a downcast gaze.”
How did it come to be that a boy who was introduced to the most powerful man in the world around the age of about thirteen, and who died before he was twenty, could have more than a hundred statues of himself echo across millennia, when entire nations and empires can lay forgotten in the ruins of time?
It’s because of the love Hadrian had for Antinous.
Beyond the standard sexual pleasures Roman elites kept for themselves, it’s clear from the historical record that the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous was of a different variety. We do not know exactly how they met, but it’s probable that the first interaction occurred in 123 CE. Hadrian had been emperor for around six years at this point, and was on a tour of the provinces. He stopped off in Claudiopolis in Bithynia of all places, where Caesar had his gay-cation with Nicomedes two centuries before.
Some historians believe Antinous was perhaps selected for further education in Italy at this point. The question of whether there was a sexual element to their relationship when they first met unanswered. But it is likely that Antinous was sent from his home to the imperial page academy in Rome, while Hadrian continued to tour the Empire, only returning to his villa at Tibur in 125 CE. Around the year 128 CE, Hadrian went on a trip to Greece, and this time he brought his favourite Antinous with him.
It was at some point during those intervening three years that the young Antinous became the emperor’s favourite. Although that is perhaps putting too delicate a point on what is more clearly a relationship. Hadrian, in his late 40s or early 50s, who hated his wife and had been infatuated with teenage boys since his adopted father Trajan made him heir, fell in love with Antinous.
Antinous accompanied Hadrian around the empire, including a tour of North Africa, and most significantly Greece, where Antinous was likely inducted with Hadrian into the Great Mysteries of Eleusis, an ancient cult that fascinated the philhellenist Hadrian. The couple travelled all around, including to Antioch, Syria, Arabia and Judea, where Hadrian zealously persecuted Jewish nationalism.
As they toured Egypt and North Africa, more evidence emerges that Antinous was not just another youth to Hadrian. There’s a depiction on the Arch of Constantine in Rome of the couple hunting together. Hadrian apparently saved Antinous’ life from a lion, and in the relief and countless bronze medallions cast to celebrate the occasion, Antinous is shown to have become muscular and hairy, certainly more of a man than when he and Hadrian first met.
Shortly after this hunt, in late September or early October 130 CE, Hadrian and his entourage were sailing up the River Nile. Also included in the retinue was a young aristocrat called Lucius Ceionius Commodus, who was later named heir by Hadrian but died before the emperor, although he did father the future emperor Lucius Verus. It’s posited that Antinous saw Commodus as a rival, or perhaps vice versa.
The emperor’s flotilla stopped at the city of Hermopolis Magna to visit the shrine of the Egyptian god Thoth. Soon after, Antinous ended up in the Nile. He drowned and died. And no one knows why, or exactly how it happened.
Accident or murder is all conjecture. But what we do know is how Hadrian reacted. And it’s probably in line with how the most powerful man in the world would react if his teenage lover died at the height of his beauty. Hadrian made Antinous a god. He was reported to have “wept like a woman” while the Egyptian priesthood immediately made Antinous part of the Egyptian pantheon, identifying him with the god Osiris given the fact he drowned in the Nile. Antinous was likely embalmed like a Pharaoh, and Hadrian ordered an entire city built on the spot where he drowned, named Antinoopolis, which became the centre of a state-sponsored religion which Hadrian cultivated.
Temples to Antinous sprung up not just in the great city which held his name, but all across the Roman world. Games known as the Antinoeia were held every year for several centuries, with chariot races, games and sacrifices being held on the anniversaries of Antinous’ birth and death.
Hadrian continued his travels around the Empire, and continued to spread the cult of Antinous. He encouraged the linking of Antinous with the god Hermes, as well as Dionysus. The cult spread to at least 70 cities throughout the Empire, and had worshipers from Asia Minor to North Africa, Italy and Spain. Artefacts connected to the worship of Antinous have been found in the Danube and in Britain.
The cult, or more accurately the organised worship of Antinous under the umbrella of the imperial Roman religion, sprang its own life. It did not die out with Hadrian, but Antinous entered the pantheon of gods. Nearly thirty temples were believed to have been constructed in his honour. A priesthood was established to celebrate him. Sculptures were widespread, and still being discovered today. Sacred nights in the faith’s home city of Antinoopolis were described as drunken revelries and orgies that surely any party boy twink would have been proud to have in his honour.
Centuries later, the worship of Antinous rivalled another growing cult, that of Jesus Christ. As Christianity became more widespread in the Empire, celebrating Antinous was brutally suppressed. As Christianity struggled for dominance throughout the fourth century, Antinous was championed by those Romans who opposed their Empire being taken over by Christianity. Antinous was, in many respects, the last stand of a non-Christian Roman culture. But Christianity won, and statues of Antinous were toppled and condemned across the Empire. It was only with the Emperor Theodosius, who will feature prominently in the last story of the gays who built and broke Rome, that worship of Antinous was officially prohibited.
The story of Antinous is perhaps unique in history. An entire religion built around the worship of not just a young gay man, but the relationship he had with a much older man. When we consider the fraught concept of gay history, it’s hard to conceptualise that for several hundred years during the height of one of the world’s most powerful empires, one could worship a hot twink at dozens of temples and shrines in nearly a hundred cities. Just imagine the sermons.
Antinous inspired Oscar Wilde, and had been at the forefront of the emerging gay sense of self which spread across late 19th century Europe. Just as Renaissance thinkers reached back to classical antiquity, so did the pioneers of a gay identity reach back to Antinous.
We don’t know what the young man thought of himself. If he recorded his own thoughts and feelings, they do not survive. Nor do we know his side of the relationship with Hadrian. But given the significant length of time Antinous was by Hadrian’s side, it’s reasonable to assume Antinous didn’t hate the situation. In fact, it could be inferred that he felt for Hadrian the way Hadrian clearly felt for him.
Regardless of how we speculate about their relationship, the impact of Antinous’ short life is legitimately comparable with other deified figures; Buddha for one, and Jesus Christ another. If not for a few critical turning points in history, it might have been the church of Antinous to carry on the legacy of the Roman Empire into the modern age.
Caracalla: the impotent tyrant who became a vicious bottom
Nearly a hundred years later, coins celebrating the worship of Antinous were still being struck during the reign of our next significant Roman gay, the Emperor Caracalla.
The young Caracalla and his brother Geta were renowned for their debauched behaviour. Caracalla is known to have embarked on numerous affairs with married women, and also raped a vestal virgin. But around 212, Emperor Carcalla left Rome on a tour of the provinces and contracted an illness. Cassius Dio, who was in fact a contemporary of Caracalla’s, reported that this made the emperor impotent, and thereafter he began to bottom for numerous men, likely soldiers, which, it was reported, was done for “the well being” of the emperor.
Throughout his rather short life, the Emperor made no attempt to marry, despite being part of the Severan dynasty that did much to promote the imperial house as a family unit. Other reasons for this were rumoured to be that he was having an incestuous affair with his powerful mother, Julia Domna. She played a similar role in the public imagination as Agrippina did in the early reign of Nero, an emperor who was also accused of Oedipian affairs.
To take the reports at face value, we have an unhinged young man who was engaged in vicious competition with his brother Geta whom he later murdered in front of their mother. Raping vestal virgins was not beyond the pale for whom history records as a cruel tyrant. Illness left him impotent, and still unmarried, which led him to seek sexual gratification perhaps the only way possible.
Caracalla stands on the precipice of Rome’s descent into the crisis of the third century. A series of unstable and unable emperors since the last of the five ‘good’ emperors Marcus Aurelias had died in 180 CE would leave Rome on the verge of collapse during the fifty year period from 235 CE until the reign of Diocletian in 284, who radically transformed the empire and built the final stages of the Roman imperial legacy which would come to define government and society in the west for the next fifteen hundred years.
In fact, just a year after Caracalla’s murder in 217 CE, we get perhaps the gayest emperor of all, Elagabalus.
Elagabalus: rule by a chaotic non-binary twink
Elagabalus became emperor around the age of fourteen, a pawn of his grandmother Julia Maesa who also conspired with the Praetorian guard to have the young emperor murdered at the age of eighteen.
When we say queer people often grow up feeling different from their peers, this is exactly how Elagabalus must have felt. They (a gender neutral pronoun probably describes Elagabalus best) were eastern, an Arab from Syria, a follower of the sun god cult of Sol Invictus, known as Elagabalus, which is how history remembers the young person called Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Chaotic twink drama is a succinct way to sum up Elagabalus’ four years as emperor. But as well as being perhaps the gayest emperor of all, Elagabalus also forms an important figure in trans history. Of course it is difficult to assign modern conceptions of gender and sexuality to ancient figures, but the facts present a young person clearly with a gender identity we would today consider non-binary, or perhaps transgender.
Elagabalus often wore make up, wigs and dresses, often used female pronouns, and offered vast sums to any doctor who could perform bottom surgery.
From the perspective of trans history, this in itself is a fascinating comment. Did the young emperor invent the concept of gender affirming surgery? Unlikely. So they must have somehow heard about this being performed elsewhere in the Classical world. When we consider the hell on earth trans people are subjected to around their own affirming healthcare, it’s interesting to consider the practice is at the very least two millennia old. We’re hardly talking about social experiments here when the practice was at the very least known about in ancient Rome.
Elagabalus made enough trouble for themselves with their love interests. Elagabalus was married four times in their young life. Three marriages to women and one to a man. Oh yes, same sex marriage is hardly a social experiment either when the practice dates back at least two thousand years, and was undertaken by a Roman emperor.
Their husband was a charioteer called Hierocles. Elagabalus lured Hierocles from an even hunkier charioteer named Gordius. After snatching him up, they married Hierocles and went around the palace and Rome calling themself Hierocles' queen.
In further twink chaos, there’s a story related by Cassius Dio who writes that Hierocles was jealous of Aurelius Zoticus, who was the hungest athlete in Rome. Elagabalus had sent out messengers to find the Roman with the largest appendage. So when the Emperor wanted to try him out, Hierocles drugged Zoticus so he couldn't get it up to top Elagabalus, disappointing the emperor who banished him from Rome.
The Augusta Historia, another ancient source which is seen as less reliable, reports that Elagabalus had another husband called Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna. Cassius Dio also writes that Elagabalus acted as a prostitute in taverns and brothels.
This presents a fascinating picture of a chaotic twink bottom who has access to any man they want, and undeniably acts on every impulse. No wonder they pissed off the aristocracy. But it’s hardly their fault. Elagabalus is more like a child actor shoved into a role they didn’t particularly care about, yet everyone acts shocked when they get involved in inappropriate behaviour.
Roman historians, most notably Gibbon who wrote the seminal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lays an awful lot of Victorian morality policing upon Elagabalus’ young shoulders. But despite the religious changes Elagabalus ordered which were quickly undone after his four year reign, they are hardly a consequential emperor. Rome was already rushing headlong into its crisis phase, brought about as much as by internal inability to deal with external threats than the threads stitched by emperors like Caracalla and Elagabalus. It was thanks to a series of generals who were unable to stop rebelling against each other and effectively deal with the Gothic invasions from the north and east which precipitated the dangerous decline, not a young queer emperor quite likely immensely enjoying themselves among the gladiator class.
Elagabalus was assassinated aged 18 in an act of violent homophobia as much as it was a political assassination. Elagabalus was clearly unsuited for the role given their young age and interest in other pursuits. But it’s hard to imagine a cis straight man of the same age ending up murdered for wild sexual pursuits with women. Indeed, plenty of other emperors were just as, if not more ‘debauched’ than Elagabalus. They just weren’t as ‘queer’ about their behaviour. Elagabalus was a femme bottom twink, and they quite clearly were killed because of it.
Theodosius: an ode to a riotous gay love triangle
The last of the gays who broke the Roman Empire, and birthed the medieval conflicts between church and kings that followed, was caused not by an emperor per se, but a charioteer, a city governor, and the handsome young cup-bearer they both loved.
We don’t know the name of the cup-bearer, but we know he was striking-looking young man and lived in the Greek city of Salonika in 390 CE. The Empire at this point was going through a religious transformation. The previous emperor, Julian the Apostate, had tried and failed to quash Christianity, and the new emperor, Theodosius I, was instrumental in putting the Empire on a firm Christian footing. In fact, Theodosius was the last emperor to rule a united Rome. The split between East and West, between Constantinople and Rome, became permanent after his rule. The West was about to enter its last century.
Theodosius is also important for having defeated the Goths, the Germanic group continually pushing into the Empire. But after winning important battles against these tribes, Theodosius came to the conclusion that the Goths could never really be fully ejected from Roman territory. Instead, he concluded an agreement with them that they could settle parts of Roman land south of the Danube in return for military service. Given the Goths were already entrenched in the Empire, the treaty was more practical than dogmatic. The Goths were allowed to remain autonomous under their own leaders, and fought as an independent ally, as opposed to being integrated into the Roman army.
In this atmosphere, Salonika was getting ready for games in the hippodrome. Christians didn’t partake in what they considered ungodly spectacles like sport, so it was non-Christians, know as Pagans but at the time just ordinary Romans who didn't subscribe to this Eastern cult, who were attending the games.
There was a great charioteer participating in these games. We don’t know his name either, just that he was incredibly famous throughout the Empire. The charioteer seduced the comely cup-bearer, or vice versa. Either way, the two men hooked up on the eve of the games. The only problem was that the cup bearer had a lover. His name was Butterich, and he was the Gothic city governor, and in charge of a Gothic force to keep the peace in the city, especially with tens of thousands of people in town for the games.
The locals didn’t particularly care for Butterich, his Goths, or Theodosius’ attempts to integrate the Goths into the fracturing Roman Empire. When Butterich found his young lover and cup-bearer in bed with the famous charioteer, he blew his top and threw the charioteer into the dungeons on the eve of the games.
The next day, as the crowds gathered in the hippodrome to see their favoured star and get his autograph, the news broke that he was actually in prison, and had been placed there by Butterich. Like any crowd who’d travelled far and wide and paid good money to see their favourite star, they were enraged. They turned into a mob who stormed the prison, freed the charioteer, and killed Butterich and his Gothic guards.
When Emperor Theodosius heard about the commotion, he tried to placate the Saloniki citizenry with the promise of new games, which would include the charioteer. Happy with the rescheduled date, the crowd once again flocked into the hippodrome to cheer on their idol. All 7,000 of them. Families and children spectating in the most Roman of pastimes.
But it was then Theodosius got his revenge. Because his troops locked the gates of the hippodrome, and the soldiers killed every single one of the 7,000 people gathered. It took them only three hours to hack them all to death in revenge for the city killing Butterich and the Goths.
In one morning, the vast majority of Saloniki’s non-Christian population was murdered in what’s known to history as the Massacre of Thessalonica. Christians suddenly became the majority in the city, clearly an omen to the rest of the restive Empire from their devout Christian leader.
But the wider impact of what happened next would come to define the next fifteen hundred years of political theory and be the cause of numerous wars through the ages. All to answer the question, who was more powerful, the church, or the king?
St. Ambrose was the bishop of Milan, and one of the key leaders in the early Christian church when the emperor still held the title later claimed by the pope. Ambrose was not exactly a pious monk. He wasn’t baptised, had no training in theology, and had only become a Christian much later in life. Perhaps when Theodosius came to power and it became politically advantageous to do so.
Ambrose was an army man and had become governor of the province covering Milan in 372 CE. In 374, there was a succession crisis over who would be the next bishop of Milan. The post was claimed by two opposing sects of Christianity, and debate was getting heated. Ambrose went to the church where the election for bishop was happening to keep the peace, and the crowd decided to proclaim Ambrose as bishop instead.
Ambrose may have become one of the Empire’s most powerful religious leaders, but he was still a politician at heart. His power was faith, and he wielded it harshly. So in 390, when Ambrose heard about the massacre ordered by Emperor Theodosius, he decided to use it to prove a point. He would refuse the Emperor holy communion until the Emperor atoned for his sins. Not just an apology, but he had to appear bare-headed in a white sack cloth in front of Ambrose if he wanted forgiveness. Quite literally, the temporal power of kings would have to kneel before the spiritual power of the church.
We still have the letter Ambrose wrote to Theodosius demanding penitence from the Emperor for his actions. Theodosius, good Christian he was, duly complied with the request. From this point onwards, Theodosius instigated ever more harsh purges against non-Christians. What’s more, Ambrose demonstrated the church’s willingness to stand up to kings; to fight wars and crusades against them, to excommunicate them and demand temporal leaders submit to their authority. For their part, kings from Charlamagne to Henry VIII to Napoleon, fought back against the church and the power they believed had been given to them by Ambrose of Milan.
All because of a handsome young cup-bearer whose beauty a champion charioteer couldn’t go without, even if his lover was the Gothic governor.
Rome: a study of human sexuality without Christian bias
The very study of Roman history is, in itself, fraught with bias. Dictators from Mussolini backwards have cherry-picked aspects of Rome to further their authoritarian agendas. Emulating or celebrating Rome in the public sphere today often denotes connotations of imperialism and subjugation. Rome was a slave society. It brutally occupied as much of the world as it could seize, while suppressing and destroying independent cultures from the Etruscans to the Carthaginians to the Jews.
But in studying the sex lives of the Roman Emperors, and Roman sexuality more generally, we are not aiming to celebrate or even lend support to a brutal thousand years in human history. Roman history presents perhaps the clearest and most detailed array of sources of how people expressed themselves sexually before the church. Given the Christianity’s violent agenda to suppress human sexuality, the Classical world, Greece and Rome, gives us from the past a pure study of human sexuality free from the moralising attitudes of Christian dogma.
The sex lives of the Roman Emperors are not necessarily representative of prevailing attitudes at the time for ordinary people. These were men who had absolute power invested in them. They operated largely free from the bounds of conventional opinion. Many went too far. Most were assassinated. Studying their lives is not a call to emulate their behaviours. Far from it. How they lived and ruled remain relevant studies on political theory, leadership and philosophy. So how they loved remains just as relevant to the understanding of human sexuality today. Their lives give us archetypes and present moral lessons we can undoubtedly find value in. Particularly for queer people.
History class should be every gay kids’ favourite subject. It’s hard to flick through a history book without multiple queer people jumping out at us. Or at least it should be. But one can go through years of schooling in history, all the way to a university degree and never be told about a gay person. Believe me.
The erasing of queer people from history starts to feel less like an oversight than a deliberate attempt to leave our community empty of the ancient routes we have. The cover up becomes even more laughable the more we look into it. Of the roughly 70 Roman Emperors across 500 years, from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, perhaps only one, Claudius, is someone who we could say with some certainty was straight. At least that’s what Gibbon says, the noted historian of the Roman Empire who essentially lays the blame for the decline and fall at the feet of gay people.
Even modern historians tend to worry far too much about labelling someone now dead as gay, or even to place their sexuality in context. Obviously Romans did not have the same conception of gay and straight as we do. But Classical sexuality shows us that ‘gay’ is just as invented a term as ‘straight.’ Nevertheless, throughout recorded history, there are documented lives of people who were attracted to or in love with people of the same sex, of both sexes, of people who wished to change their sex, and of people who, given the right circumstances, would engage in same sex behaviour. That sounds pretty LGBTQ to me.
So why don’t historians want us to know about their lives?
Imagine the impact on a young gay kid in school if every time the life of Julius Caesar was brought up, it was taught that throughout his live, he suffered insults and innuendo about his sexuality. Caesar was essentially subjected to playground rumour and gossip, yet he managed to reshape the world in his image and achieve an immortal memory. Just imagine teaching that for someone always laughed at and whispered about whether or not he had had gay sex, this was still a significant figure to be studied and remembered over two thousand years later.
Or what about the gay teenager sitting in history class who is working through not just their attraction to other boys, but their attraction to older or more powerful men. For many young gay men it is a natural inclination, albeit one fraught with complications and the vast potential to be taken advantage of. But what if they could assess whether or not the older man who was interested in them was more a Hadrian or a Trajan? Might he possibly cherish and love him, as Hadrian clearly felt towards Antinous, or will he treat him like Trajan did to his harem, using them purely for his own pleasure. Would studying the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous not provide a young gay guy far more of a guide, if not a warning, to carefully think through such age gap and power imbalance relationships? How might history have changed if Antinous had kept both eyes open when tangling with powerful men.
We also considered the life of Caracalla. A cruel tyrant whose emotional scars were cut so deep they would never heal. He used sex and even committed rape to fill that unfillable hole within himself, and when unable to go around penetrating whomever he wanted, he rounded up others to do that to him.
Being gay is not all milkshakes and video games. We’ll meet people who have been injured along the way. People we often cannot help, and cannot save. People with whom we should exercise great caution before getting entangled with them. Unfortunately, these lessons are very rarely passed on to young gay people. We have to keep learning them over and over again. Caracalla is a very good archetype that when someone demands sex from us without considering our feelings, we should be very way of getting involved.
Or what about the tortured and chaotic life of Elagabalus? A young person who, nearly two thousand years ago, without access to the internet or ‘social pressure’ or whatever nonsense anti-trans bullies come up with, decided on his own volition that he wanted to medically transition. Imagine the power of a young trans person learning and studying the life of someone who had relations with both men and women, loved sex, wanted a vagina, was obsessed with Eastern spirituality and ruled an Empire for four years. Not that the life of Elagabalus is one we should necessarily emulate, but if anything it demonstrates that to be trans is a natural part of the human experience.
Finally, the tragedy of the Massacre of Thessalonica gives us a uniquely gay insight into the dangers of jealousy. Our modern dramas of love triangles are painfully straight, built into our moralising theology that all but excludes gay people. History shows us a wronged man is a dangerous man, not least of all one with power like Butterich, the Gothic governor, and one as famous as the charioteer, who thought he could have whomever he wanted. The consequences of two powerful and jealous men fighting over a cup-bearer were devastating and deadly. Not a bad lesson for us all to remember. Play with fire and you might end up burning down the whole city.
Ultimately, perhaps the greatest lesson the history of human sexuality has to teach us is that being gay is not incompatible with greatness, or a life of significance. If anything, many of these figures and more earned their place in history because they were gay, not in spite of it.
History, however, is not only written by the victors. It’s written by those with an agenda. Especially when we consider the pre-Christian past, those agendas tend to be about erasing the notion of gay desire, gay love, and gay people from the narrative.
But, for better or worse, those stories and those lives belong to our history. Rome was not just the most powerful Empire of the ancient world, but it was, arguably, a gay empire. Built, sustained and then broken by people who were, or at least were believed to be, people who would find a home in our modern conception of the LGBTQ community. Erasing gay people from the past is a crime against scholarship, and one too often committed against us through centuries of persecution. To remember our history is an act of reclamation.
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Harry F. Rey is the author of over a dozen gay novels, including the sci-fi series The Galactic Captains (Nine Star Press), the royal drama series The Line of Succession (Deep Desires Press), a rom-com All The Lovers (Deep Desires Press), and most recently a WWII-era historical fiction novel Why in Paris? (Encircle Publications). His work has also been featured in anthologies including Not Meant for Each Other from Lost Boys Press and Queer Life, Queer Love from Muswell Press. He has written pieces for Untitled Writing and Queerlings magazine, the latter of which was nominated for a Pushcart.
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