—"Thou son of a perverse, rebellious woman, do I not know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own shame, and to the same of thy mother's nakednes".
Classic Greek
and Roman War-
riors.
We have early some examples of classic homosexuality among soldiers. Going back to the more shadowy epochs and types begin the numerous instances. Achilles and Patroclus, and the legendary Nisus and Euryalus will be remembered. In mythology we have the boy-ravishing Jove, with his rape of the beautiful young Ganymede; Apollo as the lover of Hyacinth; Hercules loving the lad Hylas, and undertaking the famous Twelve Labours because of a passion for Eurystheus. But we meed not enphasize the uranianism of classic fable or of the beginnings of national history. As hellenic civilization grows more definite, the similisexual soldier is a frequent study. In Athenaeus we learn that Agamemnon loved Argynus sexually, the naked beauty of the latter having caught the king's eye irresistibly; and that Antigonus, another royal uranian, was in love with his handsome lute-player, Aristocles. We have Charitonus and Melippus in a sexual relation. The patriotic assassination that so glorified Harmodios and Aristogeiton was in a vengeance for what was a homosexual marriage, we may say, between the two youths—whose uranic love was so virilized. As for Alexander the Great, he is mentioned as intermittently pederastic, by the account of Athenaeus, especially with respect to Bagoas, and to Hephaestion, whose sudden death plunged Alexander into an agony of grief "that exceeded all reason". Pausanias, also Epaminondas (with Kephidorus and Asophicus); Alcibiades—who was at every period of his career an irresistible seducer of men—are other examples. Julius Caesar was not only notoriously the lover of the young King Nicomedes of Bythinia, and of the youthful hostages of Gallic tribes, but of his nephew Octavianus, who later became the homosexual Emperor Augustus.
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