What the Ancient Greeks Wrote About Homosexuality in Persia – and How Much of It Is True

The modern concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” took shape in European medical science by the end of the 19th century. They do not apply to ancient societies. In the ancient world, sexual relations were structured not by the sex of one’s partner but by social status, age, the distribution of power, and the distinction between active and passive roles.

To understand how ancient societies imagined foreign sexuality, an imagological approach is useful – the study of how one culture describes and constructs the image of the “other.” For the world of ancient Greece, that “other” was Achaemenid Persia – an empire stretching from the shores of the Aegean Sea to the Indus Valley, from Egypt to Central Asia, and a civilisational antithesis to the fragmented and democratic world of Hellas.

Greek historians, philosophers, and travellers left behind an extensive but contradictory body of texts about the customs, habits, and daily life of the Persians. Questions of sex, gender roles, and homoerotic practices occupied a conspicuous place in these accounts.

Some authors claimed that the Persians had adopted the tradition of same-sex love from the Greeks themselves. Others insisted that such relations had existed in the East since time immemorial, taking specific forms – for instance, the sexual exploitation of castrated slave-eunuchs.

The reliability of these testimonies has long been debated. They may have been partly truthful ethnography – or a distorting mirror that reflected the fears, ideals, and internal conflicts of the Greeks themselves.

The Greek Model of Same-Sex Love

Before analysing Greek texts on Persian sexuality, one must understand the Greek model itself. A culture’s view of outsiders cannot be explained without understanding how it views itself.

In ancient Greek society, male homosexuality developed chiefly in the form of pederasty – socially approved and age-asymmetric relationships between an adult citizen (the erastes, or “lover”) and a freeborn adolescent (the eromenos, or “beloved”). This practice was not marginal: it was woven into the fabric of the elite’s social and political reproduction.

A mature man with life experience and political standing would take a youth from his own – typically aristocratic – circle under his patronage. Pederasty was regarded as a noble institution that cultivated courage.

The system, however, had firm boundaries. The passive role was stigmatised for an adult citizen. A youth who began to grow a beard was expected either to assume the role of erastes or to end such relationships by marrying a woman and producing heirs. An adult man who allowed himself to be penetrated faced public contempt, was accused of effeminacy, and could lose his political rights.

With this baggage – in which male love was associated with aristocracy, civic freedom, and martial valour, yet was strictly regulated by age and role – the Greeks turned their gaze toward Persia.

In the Achaemenid Empire, political and social reality was arranged differently. The Persians had no independent citizens: everyone, including the highest nobility, was considered a “slave” of the King of Kings. They had no civic gymnasia with their cult of the nude male body. Their religion, Zoroastrianism, posited different views on ritual purity. It was at the junction of these two incompatible worlds that the texts that have come down to us were produced.

Herodotus: “They Have Learnt from the Hellenes”

The earliest testimony on Persian sexuality belongs to Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE). In his Histories, describing Persian customs on the eve of the Greco-Persian Wars, Herodotus notes the Persians’ readiness to adopt foreign practices: they wore Median dress, considering it finer than their own, and used Egyptian breastplates in battle. Then he makes the following statement:

“The Persians more than any other men admit foreign usages… they have learnt from the Hellenes to have commerce with boys. They marry each one several lawful wives, and they get also a much larger number of concubines” (1.135).

By asserting that the Persian Empire borrowed the practice of same-sex love from the Greeks, Herodotus places Hellenic civilisation in the position of cultural donor. In this logic, pederasty is a hallmark of high culture – an elite practice that the barbarians found fit and prestigious to adopt from the enlightened Greeks.

This claim fits into Herodotus’s broader theory of Persian political development. He traces the Persians’ journey from the austere mountain people of Cyrus the Great’s era to the luxury-drowning nobility of the age of Xerxes. The adoption of foreign customs, including erotic ones, serves as a symptom of departure from their original severity of character.

Modern historians and scholars of the ancient Near East regard this statement as a serious distortion and a classic case of Hellenocentric projection – the transference of one’s own ideas onto another people’s reality.

Homosexual practices, including relationships between adult men and youths, were known in the Near East long before the Persians came into contact with the Greek world on the coast of Asia Minor. References to male prostitution, homoerotic cults, and same-sex contacts appear in Mesopotamian texts, Assyrian laws, and Egyptian papyri. The notion that the Persians had to wait for the arrival of the Greeks to learn about the possibility of same-sex relations does not withstand scrutiny.

As a Greek, Herodotus could not, or would not, recognise the independent development of complex sexual institutions in another culture. He observed something at the Persian court that reminded him of Greek pederasty and ascribed to it a Hellenic origin.

Plutarch: The Sexual Exploitation of Eunuchs Among the Persians

Herodotus’s claim did not go unanswered. Several centuries later it was challenged by Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st–2nd century CE), one of the leading biographers and philosophers of the Roman Empire, and a Greek by birth.

Plutarch – a Platonist and a patriot of Hellas – wrote a polemical treatise entitled On the Malice of Herodotus. In it he accuses his predecessor of sympathising with barbarians (calling him a philobarbaros) and of systematically belittling Greek feats.

As part of this polemic, Plutarch turns to the passage about the origin of homosexuality in Iran. He rejects Herodotus’s idea of borrowing and asserts:

“Herodotus, that he may still be like himself, says that the Persians learned the defiling of the male sex from the Greeks. And yet how could the Greeks have taught this impurity to the Persians, amongst whom, as is confessed by almost all, boys had been castrated before ever they arrived in the Grecian seas?”

As evidence (chapter 13 of the treatise), Plutarch points to the Persian custom of castrating boys, which in his view had existed since ancient times and had a sexual purpose.

Plutarch’s argument reveals yet another layer of ancient imagology, no less biased than the approach of Herodotus. Where Herodotus sought to “Hellenise” the Persian elites, Plutarch did the opposite: he emphasised their innate otherness, rooted in violence and despotism.

For a free Greek of the classical era, castration was a monstrous crime – an act of degradation that stripped a person of his manhood and his right to participate in the life of the polis. By linking Persian homosexuality exclusively with eunuchs, Plutarch reproduced a familiar Greek image: the East as a realm of perverted luxury and cruelty, where rulers maim their subjects’ bodies for the satisfaction of lust.

Modern historical scholarship paints a different picture. The work of the Achaemenid historian Pierre Briant, author of From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, demonstrates that ancient ideas about Persian eunuchs as pampered sex slaves are wrong.

In the Achaemenid Empire – as in the Assyrian Empire before it – eunuchs were an element of state administration. Castration served not erotic but political purposes. Eunuchs held high posts in the administration, led armies, governed provinces, and were the king’s closest confidants. Their advantage over the ordinary aristocracy lay in absolute loyalty: a eunuch could not father children, could not found a dynasty, and could not pass on power by inheritance – and therefore had no motive for usurping the throne.

Briant and other scholars note that the court had several categories of eunuchs. In addition to physically castrated servants, there were high-ranking officials from the Persian nobility who bore the title as an honorary rank unconnected with castration. For example, Bagoas served as vizier under Artaxerxes III and wielded such power that, according to Diodorus Siculus, he effectively governed the empire.

Plutarch’s claim that the Persians had since ancient times castrated boys specifically for homosexual purposes is a product of Hellenistic and Roman fears and a misunderstanding of how Near Eastern bureaucracy functioned.

Plato: Same-Sex Love as a Political Threat to Tyranny

The theme of Persian homosexuality acquires political meaning in the works of Plato. He turns to the image of Persia to address questions of political philosophy: the attitude of a regime toward love between men becomes, for him, an indicator of the character of the state.

The key statement appears in the dialogue Symposium. At the centre of the dialogue is a contest among Athenian intellectuals – Socrates, the playwright Aristophanes, the general Alcibiades, and others – each delivering a speech in praise of Eros. In the speech of Pausanias, an analysis is offered of the legal regulation of pederasty in various states (182b–c).

Pausanias argues that in Ionia (the Greek cities of Asia Minor) and in many other places under foreign rule (that is, Persian rule), pederasty is firmly condemned and forbidden. Plato puts into his character’s mouth an explanation of the reasons for this prohibition:

“…in Ionia and many other regions where they live under foreign sway, it is counted a disgrace. Foreigners hold this thing, and all training in philosophy and sports, to be disgraceful, because of their despotic government; since, I presume, it is not to the interest of their princes to have lofty notions engendered in their subjects, or any strong friendships and communions; all of which Love is pre-eminently apt to create.”

For Plato, love between men is bound up with the question of freedom and civic solidarity. In his understanding, Eros is not merely carnal desire but a force capable of inspiring courage, contempt for death, and a striving for truth. Romantic and sexual attachment between men engenders solidarity that is dangerous to tyranny: lovers are prepared to give their lives for one another and will not tolerate injustice.

Persia, in this model, is an absolute tyranny founded on the fear and isolation of its subjects. The rulers fear Eros because strong personal bonds make people bolder and more independent. By forbidding homosexual bonds among the conquered peoples, the despot robs them of the capacity for resistance.

Modern historians draw attention to a subtle detail in Plato’s text: the Persians forbade pederasty for their subjects. This implicitly suggests that the rulers and the highest aristocracy may not have denied themselves the practice. The prohibition functioned not as a universal moral norm but as a political instrument of control: noble love was a privilege of the masters, inaccessible to their slaves.

Sextus Empiricus: “Amongst the Persians It Is the Habit”

Another perspective appears centuries later in the works of the philosopher and physician Sextus Empiricus (turn of the 2nd–3rd century CE). Sextus Empiricus was an exponent of Pyrrhonian scepticism – a school holding that truth is unknowable and that all dogmatic judgements lead to mental disquiet.

In his work Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus employs the method of antithesis: to prove that no moral statement is absolute, he contrasts the customs of one people with the laws of another. In Book 1 (section 152) he writes:

“We also oppose custom to the other items – to law, for example, when we say that amongst the Persians sodomy is customary but amongst the Romans it is prohibited by law.”

Historians urge caution with this testimony. Sextus Empiricus was not writing an ethnographic treatise on the Achaemenid Empire – it had ceased to exist five centuries before his birth, destroyed by the army of Alexander the Great. Sextus was a philosopher-polemicist using stereotypes for the purposes of argument.

His statement may have drawn on the realities of Parthian or early Sasanian Iran, against which the Roman Empire fought constant wars. More likely, however, the philosopher was simply drawing on the tradition established by Herodotus.

In the Greco-Roman intellectual repertoire, the image of the East was double-sided: a realm of stern despots who forbade love (according to Plato) and, at the same time, a kingdom of unbridled licence (according to Plutarch). Sextus Empiricus selected whichever facet of the myth best suited his argument: to show the conservative Romans and Greeks of his day that their norms were not a universal law of nature, since the Persians had looked at the matter differently.

The very fact that the topos of “Persian tolerance” could circulate in the intellectual circles of late antiquity as something self-evident shows how far Greek literary projections had drifted from their historical basis.

Other Ancient Sources

Beyond the four principal authors, the theme of Persian customs and sexuality was touched upon in other Greek texts as well.

Aeschylus in his tragedy The Persians (472 BCE) does not mention homosexuality, but it was he who planted in the Greek imagination the lasting stereotype of Persian effeminacy. His Persian men are “soft sons of luxury.” This “feminisation” of Persia’s image became the foundation upon which later authors built their judgements about the gender and sexual roles of the Persians.

Xenophon in his Cyropaedia gives a satirical episode about the Persian commander Sambaulas, who had taken a young male favourite “in the Greek fashion.” When asked whether he had adopted the Greek custom, Sambaulas replies:

“By Zeus, I do enjoy both being with him and looking at him” (Cyropaedia, 2.2.28).

The episode is cast in an ironic tone: the Greek Xenophon describes a Persian imitating the Greeks. It confirms that Herodotus’s thesis about borrowing circulated actively in Greek literature of the 4th century BCE.

Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician who served at the Achaemenid court, wrote a work entitled Persica (surviving only in fragments and summaries). Ctesias did not focus on the theme of homosexuality, but it was he who introduced into Greek literature the motif of powerful court eunuchs with exclusive access to the king. The surviving fragments mention the eunuch Artoxares, “who was very influential with the king,” and Bagapates, who “had control over access to the inner chambers of the palace.” This motif later became the foundation for the eroticised stereotypes about the Persian court – stereotypes that Plutarch would later exploit.

Athenaeus in his multi-volume work Deipnosophistae (turn of the 2nd–3rd century CE) reproduces Herodotus’s idea:

“And the Persians, according to the statement of Herodotus, learnt from the Greeks to adopt this fashion” (Deipnosophistae, 13.603a–b).

Historical Reality: Zoroastrianism and the Achaemenid Court

Modern studies allow us to compare the Greek descriptions with what is known about the real ancient Iran.

The dominant religion of the Iranian peoples was Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism) – a dualistic system founded on the cosmic conflict between the all-good creator Ahura Mazda and the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu. Early Zoroastrianism is known chiefly from the Avesta, a sacred collection of texts compiled over the course of many centuries. And here a sharp contrast emerges with Greek ideas about Persian tolerance. Zoroastrian texts display uncompromising hostility toward male homosexuality, particularly toward anal intercourse.

The chief source of these prescriptions is the Vendidad (Vidēvdād), a body of religious-legal norms aimed at maintaining ritual purity. In the Zoroastrian law of that period, no distinction was drawn between homosexual and heterosexual anal intercourse: both were regarded as defilement and severely punished. Placing semen – a symbol of life and creation – in the rectum, which was associated with filth and death, was understood as a cosmic crime: a barren squandering of divine energy for the benefit of demons.

How can this orthodoxy be reconciled with the accounts of homoerotic behaviour among the Persian elite described by Greek authors? Historians offer several explanations.

The chronological factor. The Vendidad is written in Young Avestan, but the surviving text was compiled in its final form only in the Parthian or Sasanian era, centuries after the fall of the Achaemenids. In the Gathas – the oldest part of the Avesta, attributed to the prophet Zarathustra himself – there are no comparably explicit condemnations of homosexuality. Some scholars suggest that in the culture of the early nomadic Iranian peoples (Scythians, Bactrians) there may have existed tolerant practices involving androgynous shamans (the Enarees), whom Herodotus also mentions.

The factor of imperial practice. Achaemenid Persia was a multicultural conglomerate. The Kings of Kings did not impose a single code or religious dogma on their subjects – from Babylon to Egypt. The religious idealism of the Magi, guardians of ritual purity, frequently diverged from the pragmatism of the court. The Persian aristocracy governing the western satrapies (Lydia, Ionia) was in close contact with Greek culture. Historians believe that in these elite circles, Greek ideas about love between men may have had a real influence on the behaviour of Persian nobles, who adopted forms of homoerotic expression while ignoring the stern prescriptions of the Vendidad.

When the Greeks described Persian tolerance, they were probably observing the life of this thin layer of cosmopolitan nobility rather than the everyday existence of the orthodox Persian peasant.

Significantly, late-antique authors writing about Parthian and early Sasanian Iran paint a completely different picture. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (4th century CE) stated categorically:

“Most of them are extravagantly given to venery, and are hardly contented with a multitude of concubines; they are free from immoral relations with boys” (Res Gestae, 23.6.76).

The Syrian thinker Bardaisan (2nd–3rd century CE), whose observations reached us through the Book of the Laws of Countries and in quotations by Eusebius of Caesarea, echoes this view:

“On the other side of the Euphrates, and as you go eastward, he that is stigmatized as either a thief or a murderer does not much resent it; but, if a man be stigmatized as an arsenocoete, he will avenge himself even to the extent of killing his accuser.”

These later testimonies most probably reflect not the ambiguous reality of the Achaemenid court but the strict Zoroastrian morality of the Parthian and Sasanian periods. In the Sasanian era (3rd–7th centuries CE), when Zoroastrianism became a rigid state religion, systematic and widespread persecution of homosexuality began.

Greek Texts as a Mirror of Hellenic Prejudice

Any attempt to reconstruct the intimate life of the ancient Persians solely through texts written by their western neighbours and political adversaries demands rigorous critical analysis. The Greeks looked at the Persians through the lens of their polis prejudices, their own ideals of masculinity, and their fear of losing freedom.

Each of the authors examined here pursued his own aims. Herodotus asserted the cultural superiority of the Greeks. Aeschylus painted an image of effeminate barbarism. Xenophon ironised about imitation. Plutarch underscored the cruelty of the Persians. Ctesias populated literature with powerful eunuchs. Plato used Persia as a convenient image to set against freedom. Sextus Empiricus illustrated the relativity of morals. Athenaeus compiled others’ claims into an entertaining treatise. None of them set out to give an objective description of a foreign culture.

Modern scholarship, drawing on archaeology and Iranian studies, allows the picture to be cleared of centuries of mythological accretion. What emerges in place of a caricatured “kingdom of vice” or a “cradle of tolerance” is a living and contradictory society in which strict Zoroastrian orthodoxy coexisted with the pragmatism of the court, and in which the cosmopolitan nobility lived differently from what the priests prescribed.

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