KISSING BAGOAS

Abstract

An anecdote, ascribed to Dicaearchus by Athenaeus (13.603.a–b) and found also in Plutarch (Alexander 67.7–8), details Alexander's kissing of the eunuch Bagoas during theatrical contests in Carmania in 325 bce. This article examines the enthusiastic response that this encounter is said to have elicited from Alexander's soldiers. It is suggested that this impromptu kiss was read as a display of homoerotic behaviour that was fundamentally Greek, and even as a gesture of Greek domination over Persians, and that, as such, it was welcomed by the army as a momentary departure from the increasingly Persianized behaviour of the king himself and of his court. Further, consideration is given to the possibility that the choral contest in which Bagoas is reported to have competed prior to the kiss may have been an innovative form of pyrrhic dance, in which for the first time the dancers depicted Dionysus’ conquest of India.

In Carmania in 325 bce, Alexander held a set of agōnes (contests) that furnish the backdrop for one of the many entertaining vignettes that dot the Alexander traditions, a story that includes one of the more colourful minor figures of Alexander's campaigns: the eunuch Bagoas. Fresh from a choral victory in the theatre, so the anecdote goes, Bagoas came through the audience to sit by Alexander and, to the delight of the Macedonian soldiers present, received a kiss from the king. The story is variously attested. It appears in Athenaeus, where Dicaearchus’ On the Sacrifice at Ilium is cited as the source:

φιλόπαις δ’ ἦν ἐκμανῶς καὶ Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ βασιλεύς. Δικαίαρχος γοῦν ἐν τῷ περὶ τῆς ἐν Ἰλίῳ θυσίας Βαγώου τοῦ εὐνούχου οὕτως αὐτόν φησιν ἡττᾶσθαι ὡς ἐν ὄψει θεάτρου ὅλου καταφιλεῖν αὐτὸν ἀνακλάσαντα, καὶ τῶν θεατῶν ἐπιφωνησάντων μετὰ κρότου οὐκ ἀπειθήσας πάλιν ἀνακλάσας ἐφίλησεν.

King Alexander was also madly in love with boys. In any case Dicaearchus, in the work On the Sacrifice at Ilium, says that he was so overcome by Bagoas the eunuch that in view of the entire theatre he bent him over and kissed him passionately and then, when the spectators shouted approval, he obliged and again bent him over and kissed him.

(Athen. 13.603.a–b = Dicaearchus fr. 83 Mirhady; trans. Mirhady, adapted¹)

It features also in Plutarch:²

λέγεται δ’ αὐτὸν μεθύοντα θεωρεῖν ἀγῶνας χορῶν, τὸν δ’ ἐρώμενον Βαγώαν χορεύοντα νικῆσαι καὶ κεκοσμημένον διὰ τοῦ θεάτρου παρελθόντα καθίσαι παρ’ αὐτόν⋅ ἰδόντας δὲ τοὺς Μακεδόνας κροτεῖν καὶ βοᾶν φιλῆσαι κελεύοντας, ἄχρι οὗ περιβαλὼν κατεφίλησεν.

It is said, too, that [Alexander] was once viewing some choral contests, being inflamed with wine, and that his beloved, Bagoas, was in the victorious chorus and, still bedecked, went through the theatre and sat beside him. At this sight the Macedonians clapped and, shouting, demanded that he [Alexander] kiss him [Bagoas], until he embraced him and kissed him passionately.

(Plut. Alex. 67.7–8)

The anecdote could clearly serve a number of themes. While nothing can be said with confidence of Dicaearchus’ purpose, this being the sole item cited from his work On the Sacrifice at Ilium (although see below for a suggestion), the castings of the tale in Athenaeus and Plutarch impute to Alexander various forms of lack of restraint and self-control. For Athenaeus this is a story illuminating Alexander's sexual inclinations, one that substantiates the assertion that Alexander was a lover of boys (philopais). Athenaeus’ speaker explicitly notes the lack of moderation in that inclination (he was ‘madly’ in love: ekmanōs), an implication emphasized by the highlighting of Alexander's emotional response to Bagoas’ presence (Alexander is ‘overcome’ [hēttasthai]), by the intensity of the kiss (kataphilein) that Alexander delivers first of his own volition, and by the vigour of his embrace which bends Bagoas back (anaklan).³ A striking contrast is afforded by a passage in Xenophon, who uses Agesilaus’ refusal of a kiss from the young, aristocratic and beautiful Persian Megabates to illustrate the self-mastery (enkrateia) of that Spartan king. Alexander's active kissing of Bagoas indeed far transgresses the model of the disciplined Agesilaus, who will not even consent to be the recipient of a kiss. The Socrates of Xenophon similarly links sōphrosynē (self-restraint, moderation) itself to the principle of refraining from kissing youths.⁴ Athenaeus’ subsequent listing after the Bagoas story of a number of other anecdotes that instead insist on Alexander's self-control (for example, by privileging his friendships over his lusts) further establishes the function of this anecdote within a contended discourse around the characterization of Alexander's sexual behaviour.⁵

Plutarch's interests in the story lie in a different direction. Plutarch notoriously characterizes Alexander in his Life as a man ‘relentless in his pursuit of empire but self-controlled in most non-military situations, and especially in his amorous relationships’.⁶ Thus in the early chapters of the biography, in which Alexander's temperament is delineated, Plutarch describes him as largely uninterested in the pleasures of the body and claims that he ‘indulged…with great moderation’ (Plut. Alex. 4.8), claims for which Plutarch furnishes proof in later episodes throughout the biography.⁷ The erotic dimensions of the Bagoas story are not disguised by Plutarch: he labels Bagoas as Alexander's erōmenos (boy lover), and the term used of the kiss itself (kataphilein, present also in Athenaeus/Dicaearchus) is typically used by Plutarch of erotic encounters, especially in anecdotes about hetairai and their lovers (such as Lamia and Demetrius Poliorcetes, or Aspasia and Pericles).⁸ He does, however, employ less emphatic language than Athenaeus in describing the embracing of Bagoas (merely periballein [embrace] rather than anaklan); in his version, too, Alexander's kiss is delivered not spontaneously but only after the soldiers demand it, where the explicitly theatrical framing of the scenario raises the possibility that the passion of the delivered kiss had something of a staged quality to it. However we assess the erotic elements in the text, though, if this is principally a story about Alexander's sexuality, its very inclusion by Plutarch is curious indeed; he felt no compulsion to address the question of Alexander's more significant relationship with Hephaestion.⁹ For Plutarch, the emphasis instead is perhaps on the interlude of drunkenness and Dionysian licence that followed upon the tortuous crossing of the Gedrosian desert in 325.¹⁰ The relevant chapter of the Alexander opens with a treatment of the famed ‘Bacchic revel’ through Carmania, in which Plutarch focuses on the drinking involved with the concomitant neglect of military discipline:

εἶδες δ’ ἂν οὐ πέλτην, οὐ κράνος, οὐ σάρισαν, ἀλλὰ φιάλαις καὶ ῥυτοῖς καὶ θηρικλείοις παρὰ τὴν ὁδὸν ἅπασαν οἱ στρατιῶται κυαθίζοντες ἐκ πίθων μεγάλων καὶ κρατήρων ἀλλήλοις προέπινον, οἱ μὲν ἐν τῷ προάγειν ἅμα καὶ βαδίζειν, οἱ δὲ κατακείμενοι … τῷ δ’ ἀτάκτῳ καὶ πεπλανημένῳ τῆς πορείας παρείπετο καὶ παιδιὰ βακχικῆς ὕβρεως, ὡς τοῦ θεοῦ παρόντος αὐτοῦ καὶ συμπαραπέμποντος τὸν κῶμον.

Not a shield was to be seen, not a helmet, not a spear, but along the whole march with cups and drinking horns and flagons the soldiers kept dipping wine from huge casks and mixing bowls and pledging one another, some as they marched along, others lying down…Then, upon this disordered and straggling procession there followed also the sports of Bacchanalian license, as though Bacchus himself were present and conducting the kōmos (revel).

(Plut. Alex. 67.4–6, trans. Perrin, adapted)

From this scene Plutarch transitions to the festivities held in Carmania, and thus to the kissing of Bagoas; this too is portrayed as undertaken in the spirit of licence that has characterized Alexander's recent progress, with the king ‘inflamed with wine (methuōn)’ while watching the agōnes.¹¹

Modern treatments of this anecdote have tended similarly to concentrate on its exposition of Alexander's character.¹² In what follows, I aim to examine instead what this anecdote may suggest about the dynamics between Alexander and his army. More specifically, I propose that, like the more famous and contested kissing (proskynēsis) in Alexander's reign, the episode of Bagoas’ kiss has something of a cultural significance, and that the enthusiasm of the soldiers for Alexander's kissing of Bagoas can be understood against the backdrop of the increasingly autocratic and ‘Persianized’ nature of Alexander's kingship and of the tensions that this created within Alexander's camp.

Both extant versions of the story feature Alexander's interaction with his soldiers. They formed (at least part of) the audience for the contests at Carmania, and their endorsement of the amorous display is emphasized in both Plutarch and Athenaeus: in Plutarch, the kiss is delivered after the gesture was loudly demanded by the soldiers; in Athenaeus, Alexander kisses Bagoas of his own volition, then accedes to a second kiss at the enthusiastic behest of the audience. Their approval for a gesture that – in elite philosophical circles at least – would be regarded with opprobrium is consistent with the fostering of military camaraderie through sexual banter attested in other contexts: thus, for example, in listing the traits that endeared the young Antony to his soldiers, Plutarch observes:

ἦν δέ που καὶ τὸ ἐρωτικὸν οὐκ ἀναφρόδιτον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τούτῳ πολλοὺς ἐδημαγώγει, συμπράττων τε τοῖς ἐρῶσι καὶ σκωπτόμενος οὐκ ἀηδῶς εἰς τοὺς ἰδίους ἔρωτας.

Somehow even his conduct in the field of love was not without its charm, indeed it actually won for him the favour of many; for he assisted them in their love affairs and submitted pleasantly to their jests upon his own amours.

(Plut. Ant. 4.5, trans. Perrin)

There may, however, be a further key aspect in which, in his kissing of Bagoas, Alexander elicited the approval of the rank and file. The act of kissing had, after all, become highly politicized in Alexander's court as an element of the king's adoption of Persian protocols. Within those protocols, kissing held an important place; it made visible social hierarchies, and was among the complex of gestures that constituted proskynēsis in the Achaemenid context.¹³ As had been observed as early as Herodotus, Persians greeted each other with a kiss: in the case of social equals, this would be a kiss on the mouth, while a social inferior might bestow a kiss on the cheek of a man his (slight) superior, while a kiss might be blown from a distance (often after a gesture of obeisance) to one significantly superior in station.¹⁴ In the case of the Persian king, his bestowal of a kiss served to mark out those recognized as his kin. Rung summarizes thus the Achaemenid protocols for interaction with the ruler:

[M]ost people were obliged to perform proskynēsis (the royal official in the form of hand-kissing with/without a small bow while the rest of the people performed it as prostration, bowing down or kneeling). Exceptions were made for the royal family, who did not perform proskynēsis but kissed the king and got a kiss from him.¹⁵

Alexander's infamous experiment(s) with the introduction of proskynēsis in Bactra in 327 had drawn upon these Persian usages. In Chares’ account of the attempt, Alexander had required the select group dining with him to blow a kiss, in return for which they were kissed by the king.¹⁶ As Pontier has noted, Alexander was here attempting to forge something of an uncomfortable amalgam of Persian gestures, with the motif of subordination (the blown kiss) answered and compensated by a gesture of kinship from the king – a kinship granted at his favour.¹⁷ The quip of Callisthenes, who made little of the king's withholding of a kiss after his own omission of the blown kiss (‘Well, then, I shall go away the poorer by a kiss!’), was thus a pointed attack; this Greek set more store on his independence than on a conceded kinship with the king, disdaining the deferential mode of kissing that Greek writers had emphatically identified as Persian custom.¹⁸

Alexander's employment of Persian modes of kissing was not confined to the Bactra episode. In the tense atmosphere of the discharge of his veterans and the ensuing rebellion at Opis, Alexander spurned his Macedonian hetairoi (companions) and summoned instead select Persians, permitting only his kinsmen among them to give him the ‘customary’ kiss (τούτοις νόμιμον ἐποίησε φιλεῖν αὐτὸν μόνοις, Arr. 7.11.1, where the ‘custom’ is clearly an allusion to Persian practice).¹⁹ This kiss is the focal point of the speech given in Arrian to one Callines, the spokesman of the Macedonian soldiers who were now contrite over their attempted rebellion (‘This, o king, is what grieves the Macedonians, that you have made Persians your kinsmen…and they are permitted to kiss you, but no Macedonian has tasted this privilege’, Arr. 7.11.6–7, trans. Iliff Robson), and Alexander's reconciliation with his Macedonian troops is effected by granting them the privilege of kissing the king.

Significantly, however, the kissing of Bagoas was of a very different sort. It cannot be accommodated within the framework of Persian protocol: Bagoas was no kinsman of the king, nor is there any evidence that he held a position of high authority in Alexander's court (or indeed had done so previously in Darius’ court).²⁰ Instead, as noted above, both Athenaeus and Plutarch cast the kiss as sexual in nature, and the homoerotic mode of kissing belonged to a Greek, not Persian, cultural context. This is not to deny any presence of homosexual practices in Persia; it is the case, however, that Greek traditions ascribed the origins of Persian pederastic liaisons to the Greeks. The famous locus here is in Herodotus, who (shortly after his detailed description of the Persian practices of kissing in salutation) notes the Persian alacrity in adopting foreign customs, claiming ‘their luxurious practices are of all kinds, and all borrowed: the Greeks taught them pederasty’ (Hdt. 1.135.1, trans. Godley).²¹ While a simplification (and possible misrepresentation) of the truth, what is important here is the existence of such views closely linking Persian homosexuality – and more particularly pederasty – with Greek culture within the Greek traditions. The divergence between the two cultures is at play in an anecdote in Xenophon (he himself the source of much of our material on Greek understandings of the Persian kiss) about the mocking by members of the Persian elite of the relationship between one Sambaulas and an ugly youth. Sambaulas is asked if he and the youth live ‘in the Greek fashion’ (κατὰ τὸν Ἑλληνικὸν τρόπον) and is taunted to kiss him ‘as a kinsman’ (Cyr. 2.2.28, 31).

Moreover, for Greek observers of Alexander's day, not even Bagoas’ condition as a eunuch would have rendered an erotic connection between him and the king as being in accordance with Persian norms. Tales of erotic connections between eastern kings and eunuchs do appear in Roman Imperial-period sources, and the representation of Bagoas in Curtius (whose treatment of the eunuch displays such an ‘elaborate moralistic structuring’ as to render it virtually worthless²²) is consistent with these later attitudes. He remarks upon the herd of eunuchs who attended the royal concubines and who were themselves the objects of the king's sexual pleasure (6.6.8 ipsi muliebria adsueti: they were accustomed to acting as women), and claims that Bagoas had been Darius’ sexual favourite before he assumed that same role for Alexander (6.5.23; cf. 10.1.25 Alexandrum obsequio corporis devinxerat sibi: [Bagoas] had bound Alexander to him by submitting his body²³); Curtius’ Orxines, moreover, labels Bagoas the king's whore (scortum).²⁴ In classical Greek authors, by contrast, issues of eroticism and sex are largely absent; instead, themes of revenge, court intrigue, and tyrannical leanings (among others) dominate the image of the Persian eunuch.²⁵ Ctesias, for example, gives a eunuch a pivotal role in the death of the last Median king Astyages, while Theopompus recounts the execution by the Persian king of Hermias, the eunuch tyrant of Atarneus, for his alleged conspiracy with Macedon against the Persian throne.²⁶ Greek writers do single out a particular eunuch as being the ‘favourite’ of the king – thus Bagapates for Cyrus and Izabates for Cambyses (Ctesias FGrH 688 fr. 9, 13) – but the eunuch's influence is not specified as sexual. There is also at times an emphasis on the physical beauty of boys selected as eunuchs, but everyone around the Great King (including the king himself) was notoriously beautiful, and again the selection of beautiful boys need not imply sexual usage²⁷ – just as Alexander's own introduction into his Companion cavalry of Asians ‘conspicuous for handsomeness’ (so Arr. 7.6.3, in a list of Alexander's alleged ‘Persianizing tendencies’) speaks to an ongoing concern for beauty around the king rather than to a sexual agenda. For classical writers, interest in Persian sexual behaviours is concentrated on concubines and multiple wives and not on eunuchs.²⁸

For what it is worth, too, claims of homosexual behaviour are in fact more prevalent around the Macedonian court. Notable is Theopompus’ diatribe against the character of Philip II and his entourage, in which the open keeping of ‘two or three male prostitutes’ features among a litany of complaints about Macedonian behaviour (FGrH 115 fr. 225b). Theopompus’ critique is highly rhetorical, but a clustering of anecdotes about the Macedonian kings and their male lovers (and about same-sex relationships within groups such as the basilikoi paides, the royal pages) do suggest that male homosexual relationships were a visible part of Macedonian culture and indeed were less tightly constrained by social conventions than those in places like Athens.²⁹

From the perspective of the Greeks themselves, then, the lack of a sexual dimension in a eunuch's traditional service of the Persian king will have located Alexander's gesture within recognized Greek, rather than Persian, sexual behaviours (in terms of sexual behaviours, it is Alexander's acquisition of Darius’ harem of concubines that signals the reverse, that is, Alexander's ‘going Persian’³⁰). To kiss Bagoas was to embrace a Greco-Macedonian mode of conduct; in the eyes of the onlooking army, it was to impose such a mode upon a Persian and to Hellenize him. This functional ‘Hellenization’ of Bagoas is in fact evident in both literary versions of the episode.³¹ In Plutarch's version, Bagoas’ status as a eunuch is entirely ignored and he is designated instead as the king's erōmenos, while Athenaeus embeds the story in a conversation about the Greek love of boys in which all the specific historical and mythological examples offered are drawn from a Greek context, and in which the only consideration of such affairs in Persia is a quotation of Herodotus’ claim (at 1.135, mentioned above) that the Persians ‘learned about sex with boys from the Greeks’.³² Read in terms of recognized Greek sexual behaviours, moreover, Alexander's treatment of Bagoas signalled the Persian's submission to his dominance; this is most explicit in Athenaeus’ version, in which the boy is not merely embraced but ‘bent over’ (anaklan) by the king.³³ Such a display will have resonated particularly well in a festive context, the purpose of which was in part to celebrate the Greco-Macedonian conquest of that farthest-flung outpost of the Persian empire, namely India.³⁴

On this reading, the Bagoas who features so briefly in the theatre anecdote of Athenaeus and Plutarch's Alexander serves a rather different literary function from the more extensively treated Bagoas of Curtius’ account (hence perhaps Curtius’ omission of the theatre anecdote).³⁵ Curtius’ Bagoas in fact signals the Macedonian king's increasing orientalism and – in a fashion perhaps relevant to the experience of powerful imperial wives and freemen for Curtius’ Roman audience – his increasing susceptibility to the intrigues of a court system in which women and ‘others’ exercised undue influence.³⁶ In Curtius’ narrative, the arrival of Bagoas at Alexander's court almost directly prefaces the introduction (at 6.6.1–8) of Alexander's ‘decline’ into orientalism and dissolution:

Hic vero palam cupiditates suas solvit continentiamque et moderationem, in altissima quaque fortuna eminentia bona, in superbiam ac lasciviam vertit.

It was in fact at this time that Alexander gave loose rein to his passions, and changed continence and self-control, eminent virtues in every exalted fortune, to haughtiness and wantonness.³⁷

(Curt. 6.6.1, trans. Rolfe)

It is similarly with the corruption of Alexander's court that Bagoas is linked when he makes his only other appearance in Plutarch, where (in the De adulatore et amico 65c–d rather than the Alexander) he is included in a clique of flatterers such as Medius of Larissa, under whose influence Alexander submitted ‘to be worshipped, bedecked and fantastically tricked out…after the manner of a barbaric idol’, while the downfall was contrived of good men like Callisthenes, Parmenion, and Philotas.³⁸ The episode of Bagoas in the theatre, by contrast, marks a brief interlude in which Alexander seemingly returns to his own cultural norms and even to his role as a leader in a campaign of Hellenic revenge.

Those norms are themselves accentuated by the markedly Greek cultural context in which the episode is framed: the theatre with its choral agōnes. Alexander's agōnes mousikoi (musical contests) functioned often as displays of Greek identity; those in Carmania themselves followed a revel that the sources understand, in a fundamentally Greek fashion, as a Dionysian kōmos.³⁹ (That it is Plutarch who documents this cultural context is unsurprising, given his pervasive interest in the Alexander in questions of Alexander's ambivalent Hellenism.⁴⁰) This quintessentially Greek setting itself may have encouraged Alexander's spontaneous and public performance of the kiss. Further, the ritual licence associated with the theatre perhaps encouraged the interaction between Alexander and his soldiers.⁴¹ There is something of a parallel in the songs sung by troops during triumphs in Rome, songs which had a strong Saturnalian element whose licence may have been encouraged by the ritual context of the procession itself.⁴² In his triumph following his Gallic campaign, Caesar's troops notoriously made merry (among a variety of slurs) with his alleged affair with the Bithynian king Nicomedes. That topic had long been deployed against Caesar by his political enemies such as Cicero and Bibulus, with the calumny gaining added bite from the assumption that Caesar, as the younger man, had assumed the passive role.⁴³

Even within the carnival atmosphere of the theatre, however, Alexander's good-humoured response is notable, and speaks to his alignment with Greek modes of behaviour. Again the later example of Caesar is illuminating. Dio (43.20) claims that while Caesar was angered by his soldiers’ taunts about Nicomedes to the extent of denying under oath the existence of the affair, he was otherwise pleased by their display of parrhēsia (free and frank speech). Parrhēsia, a very Greek virtue, and Alexander's intolerance of it stand at the heart of two significant Alexander episodes prior to Carmania – Alexander's murder of Cleitus, and the downfall of Callisthenes – and, while the source traditions on Callisthenes’ fall may be the product of later developments, the death of Cleitus is unambiguous and is linked to his outspoken criticism of the king in another Greek context, the symposium, in which some ritual licence could have been expected.⁴⁴ Alexander's tolerant response to his soldiers in Carmania, then, marks a moment of departure from the overbearingly hierarchical style of monarchy that Alexander had been increasingly adopting.

It is this cultural dimension of the gesture of kissing Bagoas – its ostentatiously Greek nature, staged within the Greek cultural space of theatrical competitions – that may have fed the enthusiasm of the soldiers upon which our traditions comment. It played well to a Macedonian rank and file who had not welcomed the ‘Persianization’ of the king and his court. Their discomfiture had been, of course, less pronounced than that of some highly-ranked members of the court who had been the immediate target of elements such as the experiment with proskynēsis, and it is only when ‘Persianization’ began directly to impact the troops themselves – as it did when Alexander introduced the 30,000-strong Epigonoi (young Persians trained in the use of Macedonian weapons) – that an open backlash from the army itself is seen.⁴⁵ Curtius, however, explicitly includes the troops in his discussion of the reception of Alexander's initial adoption of Persian dress and customs (a discussion that prefaces the campaign against Bessus), and Plutarch similarly implies that the dislike which Alexander's public wearing of a Persianized costume elicited was widespread among the army from the start.⁴⁶ Arrian also alludes to a long-standing disdain among the troops for the king's ‘Persianization’ when he makes the rank and file his key focus in his treatment of the arrival of the Epigonoi at Susa and the ensuing mutiny of the troops at Opis.⁴⁷ To men displeased by Alexander's Persian trappings, the display of a Greek mode of behaviour, and its imposition on a Persian whose culture of kissing was markedly different, will have been welcome entertainment.

I do not mean to suggest here that Alexander's impromptu kiss marks any actual reversal of his policies. It certainly did not foreshadow any backing away from the incorporation of foreign customs or peoples, even if other aspects of the king's behaviour at the time might have suggested otherwise: the ‘reign of terror’ – Alexander's removal of delinquent satraps and generals – was in full swing, one effect of which was to reduce the number of Persian satraps drastically and thereby perhaps to create the impression of a lessened reliance on the Persian elite.⁴⁸ Carmania would see the arrival of further ‘barbarian’ cavalry whose presence would feature, alongside the Epigonoi, among the Macedonians’ grievances at Susa where the mass marriages were famously staged,⁴⁹ and the later tensions at Opis would ultimately show that Alexander did not intend to rely exclusively on Greco-Macedonian personnel; nor did he intend to disdain Persian customs (including the kiss as a marker of social privilege in his court). But in the atmosphere of the revived bond between king and army that seems to have been forged by the shared hardship of the Gedrosian crossing and the shared revels that followed, and in the atmosphere of Greek licence within the theatre, the troops – always eager to be on good terms with Alexander – recognized a king whose theatrical gesture had made him once again, albeit briefly, publicly one of their own, and they responded with enthusiasm.⁵⁰

Addendum: the choral agōnes at Carmania

At Alex. 67.7 (quoted above), Plutarch does not specify the kind of choral contest in which Bagoas had competed. Contests of choruses might suggest dithyrambs, a form of choral song performed with dance and traditionally associated with Dionysus.⁵¹ The mention of Bagoas’ ‘decorated’ state would fit well with dithyrambic competition, in which (at Athens at least) performers were elaborately costumed and in which members of the victorious chorus probably received crowns (as certainly did their chorēgos, the financer of the chorus).⁵² Another possibility may be pyrrhic dance, a form of dance in which the participants carried shields and mimicked battle movements.⁵³ That Alexander may have included pyrrhic contests at his festivals has some inherent plausibility, given that among the many varied traditions on the origins of pyrrhic dancing some drew a connection to Alexander's own ancestor through the Molossian line, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus; one of the authorities to do so was none other than the Macedonians’ favourite playwright, Euripides, in a play (the Andromache) well known to Alexander.⁵⁴

There is, moreover, a rather tantalizing note in Athenaeus that pyrrhic dances had by his time become associated with Dionysus, and that the dancers ‘portray Dionysus and the Indians, and the story of Pentheus’ (14.631b). Any implication by Athenaeus that a Dionysian connection as such for pyrrhic was a late development is misleading.⁵⁵ The imitation of Dionysus and the Indians, however, cannot predate Alexander, for the myth of Dionysus’ conquest of India was itself a product of Alexander's campaign.⁵⁶ Might, then, this particular manifestation of the pyrrhic have originated with Alexander and his Carmanian festival? In his investigation of Athenaeus’ ‘bacchic pyrrhics’, Slater was already prompted to suggest Alexander more generally as the innovator. He does not speculate about the festival at which such an innovation may have been introduced, but draws attention to the story that, after Alexander's discharge of his veterans at Opis, the retiring Macedonians derided the recently arrived Epigonoi as ‘[Alexander's] young pyrrhichistai with whom he could go on and conquer the world’ (Plut. Alex. 71.2, trans. Perrin, adapted).⁵⁷ The events at Opis took place, of course, in the year following the Carmanian festival; had Alexander introduced the pyrrhic as a portrayal of Dionysus and the Indians at the festival, the snide reference to the young Persian Epigonoi as pyrrichistai by those who had actually conquered India (the retiring veterans) would have real sting – and particularly so if another young Persian, Bagoas, had earlier performed as a pyrrhic dancer at Carmania, providing a precedent for the training of a Persian in Greek fashion but thus imputing eunuch-like status to the Epigonoi.⁵⁸

The context in Carmania is, moreover, particularly fitting for such an innovation. A close engagement with the figure of Dionysus is evident throughout Alexander's time in, and return from, India. That engagement had culminated in the ‘Bacchic kōmos’ that preceded the Carmanian festival (so Plut. Alex. 67.6, quoted above) and, in a notice about the festivities themselves, Arrian specifies that Alexander offered thank offerings for his conquest of India.⁵⁹ An innovation in pyrrhics representing ‘Dionysus and the Indians’ would fit well in this context. It could also be noted that, while in India, Alexander's entourage had been struck by the Indians’ own propensity to dance ‘in the satyric fashion’ and had associated that propensity with what they believed to have been Dionysus’ presence in the region; some forms of ‘satyric dance’ were themselves akin to pyrrhic dance.⁶⁰ Such considerations might encourage the posited link between Alexander and new depiction in pyrrhics of Dionysus among the Indians.

Could Dicaearchus’ prime interest in the Bagoas story in his On the Sacrifice at Ilium in fact have been the festival in Carmania and its new form of pyrrhic contest, rather than (for example) in Alexander's sexual inclinations, as some have suggested?⁶¹ This hypothesis requires, of course, that Plutarch's version of the story also derives ultimately from Dicaearchus, since it is in Plutarch and not Athenaeus that we get mention of Bagoas as choral competitor. Dicaearchus was certainly interested in the origins and evolution of Greek musical and cultural forms (see especially fr. 72–4, 84, 89–93, 100, 105–9 Mirhady), and himself discussed the origins of kyklioi khoroi in a work titled On the Dionysiac Contests (fr. 99 Mirhady); the origins of the pyrrhic chorus in particular seem to have been a matter of some scholarly dispute among the Peripatetics.⁶² Moreover, Arrian indicates that Alexander's sacrifices at Troy – which were, in Badian's view, the topic of Dicaearchus’ On the Sacrifice at Ilium ⁶³ – included one undertaken with his descent from Neoptolemus in mind: Alexander offered sacrifice to the Trojan king ‘praying Priam not to be wroth with the race of Neoptolemus, of which he himself was a scion’ (so Arr. 1.11.8, trans. Iliff Robson). A digression on Alexander's subsequent development of Neoptolemus’ pyrrhic dance at Carmania – and with it, the picturesque detail of the king's interaction with his young Persian pyrrhic dancer – could have been readily accommodated in Dicaearchus’ discussion of this gesture at Troy.