No, how he acted in, and described, his same-sex relationships was not just considered inappropriate from a 21st Century heterosexual perspective, it was considered inappropriate from a 17th century heterosexual perspective. Contemporary accounts made this abundantly clear.
The fact he married and had children (as well as not being exactly unheard of in similar situations in the 21st century), was not unusual if you consider the fact that it is only in the modern era that marriage and procreation considered to have much, if anything, to do with love and attraction. And this was doubly so for monarchs where who they married and how many children they produced was of critical importance for the future of the state (and its foreign policy), and necessary regardless of the sexual peccadilloes of monarch in question.
When term is used by about the favorites of the like of James I and Edward II, it is CLEARLY meant to describe them as homosexual lovers. To say otherwise requires historians to simply ignore the wealth of primary sources that are quite clear about it.
Obviously we will never know whether or not Caesar really had a sexual relationship with Nicomedes of Bithynia, but it is very likely it was libel. Not because having sex with another man was necessarily shameful - it wasn’t, in fact - but playing the receptive role in sex was.
Mark me down as another person having trouble with homosexuality as a category in pre-modern times. Royalty who may or may not have engaged in same-sex erotic relations, on the other hand, sounds like a fun thread.
Jerseyman, I’m not sure what you mean by that interpretation of Suetonius’ ‘every man’s woman and every woman’s man’. Can you explain a bit more?
I also have to agree, DrDeth, that there seems to be pretty compelling evidence it was possibly a homoerotic relationship. You’re asking why people assume it is, and I’ll ask you why you assume it isn’t.
And though not a monarch, there’s Grand Duke Konstantine of Russia. His journal entries were full of self-loathing and shame. (Despite being married, his homosexual tendencies were quite strong and he was a frequent visitor to the bathhouses).
Especially because Nicomedes was one of those “decadent Eastern potentates” that all good Romans were supposed to look down upon, and because, according to the rumors, he did it in exchange for Bithynia’s fleet, which made him a whore.
Also, to add to your list of Roman emperors engaging in same sex relations, Cassius Dio claims that Elagabalus enjoyed dressing up as a woman and visiting brothels, where he’d prostitute himself to the male clients. He also, according to Cassius Dio, married and had sex with a lot of women, so he could learn how a woman could best please a man, after which he married a slave charioteer named Hierocles, and called himself Hierocles’s “wife” This same Hierocles had been loved by the Emperor Gordian, but that carried no scandal, because Gordian had been the active partner.
He then committed “adultery” with other men, and then when Hierocles would catch him in this, often by Elagabalus’s planning, Hierocles would beat him. But Elagabalus didn’t reject him because of this, but loved him all the more, and wanted to make him Caesar. Cassius Dio also says that Elagabalus asked his physicians to surgically give him a vagina, and offered a large sum of money to anyone who could do so.
I’m sure Elagabalus was a little freaky, but our only source for him is the Historia Augusta, which is way worse than Suetonius for gossipy fictions, and that’s saying a lot. The HA needs to be taken with a whole truckload of salt.
Not true. We also have Cassius Dio’s “Roman History”, which is where I took the above from (Book 80, Chapters 13-15). We also have Herodian, but he doesn’t talk about any homosexuality.
Oh, and in terms of emperors who may have had same sex relationships, there’s the stuff that Tiberius was up to at Capri, although that’s Suetonius, so…
I’m a little bit obsessed with the Historia Augusta, actually. It’s far cooler than anything in the later Empire has a right to be.
I suspect many of the Roman emperors had sexual relationships with other males. It probably was just not noteworthy enough if it was done discreetly and the emperor was the active, penetrating partner.
Philip II of Macedonia, Alexander’s father, also had male lovers. The Spartan kings all did, too. I’m trying to think of what other Greek places had royalty…
While he wasn’t royalty, exactly, the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus (if he actually was a tyrant) was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton after a series of events that started when Hipparchus fell in love with and was spurned by Harmodius.
In addition to Phillip of Macedon, Archelaus of Macedon was supposedly killed by his lover Crateuas because he wouldn’t let Crateuas marry his daughter.
Hiero I. tyrant of Syracuse loved a boy named Daelochius. As he put it “My passion for Daelochus arises from the fact that human nature perhaps compels us to want from the beautiful, but I have a very strong desire to attain the object of my passion with his love and consent.”
Actually, it’s probably shorter to make a list of prominent ancient Greeks who didn’t have eromenoi. Not that many of these people would necessarily consider themselves homosexual today. Sex with teenage boys was just the thing to do in most of ancient Greece.
It’s funny - in the context of a thread like this, we’re looking for royalty in Greece, as pretty much all of them had same-sex relationships, rather than looking for people who had same-sex relationships among royalty. A bit backwards from the OP.
If I have a bit of time later, I’ll look up some specific stories about Spartan kings.
In four years, no one’s mentioned the Bourbon Duke of Cadiz, Francisco de Asis ? He was only a King-Consort, but both his grandfathers were Kings, his wife was a Queen-Regnant, and his alleged son was Alfonso XII King of Spain.
That Francisco was an effeminate homosexual who did not please his wife is very widely known and the present King of Spain, H.M. Juan Carlos, probably does not have the Bourbon Y-chromosome. (This wouldn’t affect his legal right to rule: Spain was inherited through Francisco’s wife, and children of married women always default to “legitimate.”)
Threads like this make me wonder if in 2000-3000 years people are going to look back at Barack Obama and not-unseriously wonder if he was gay and had a gay lover in college and got married on Mars during a teleportation experiment.
The evidence is ambiguous, as usual. Frederick for all of his writing was quite vague as to specifics about his own personal issues. Voltaire ( who had his own interests in Frederick apparently ) so accused him in a bitchy scandal sheet written after he and Fred became estranged. But though Voltaire might be considered unreliable, it does seem to be another in a series of clues where Fred’s interests lay. Quoting:
Frederick certainly confided to Grumbkow, one of the most influential ministers at his father’s court, that he felt too little attracted to the female sex to be able to imagine marriage…But if he did not do it, he certainly talked about it; the conversation of the inner court was peppered with homoerotic banter. Frederick’s satirical poem Le Palladion ( 1749 ), which was read out to the great amusement at the king’s petit soupers, offered reflections on the pleasures of ‘sex from the left’ and painted a lurid scene in which Darget, one of the Potsdam favourites, was sodomized by a band of lecherous Jesuits.
From The Iron Kingdom:The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark ( 2006, Penguin Group ).
So while it’s possible Frederick may not have acted on his impulses and been in affect celibate ( Voltaire’s accusations of his flings with Prussian cadets notwithstanding ), it seems likely that his orientation was distinctly ‘leftwards’ to borrow the above euphemism ;).
Well, if we are going to get into cultural models of sexuality, then homosexuality as we currently conceive of it didn’t exist at all prior to this century, and neither did for the most part, our idea of heterosexuality. I think for the purposes of this question we are just looking for same sex sexual behavior.