The Ancient World

Despite declaring an attempt to write a queer history straying away from focusing too much on individuals1, I cannot help myself from indulging in a few hundred words on Sappho. Very little is known for sure about her early life, but she was from Lesbos, being born around 620 BCE2 in either of the island's major cities, Eressos or Mytilene, and potentially to an aristocratic family. What we do know is that she ran an academy for young, unmarried women that was devoted to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, the Goddesses of love, beauty, desire and fertility, and of course, she wrote lyrical poems, designed to be accompanied by music on the lyre. 

    And on more than one occasion (there were two
    of them, to be exact), while I looked on, too
    silent with adoration to say your name,
    you glazed your breasts and arms with oil.
    No holy place existed without us then,
    no woodland, no dance, no sound.
    Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
    days we spent might be made twice as long.
    I prayed for one word: I want.
    Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
    even in another time.
Translated by Sherod Santos 

The impact of these works was immense, firstly on ancient poetry: her colloquial tone, and focus on deeply human intimacy led a shift away from the religious and ceremonial norm. Later, she was translated by and inspired the Romantic poets such as Percy Shelley (Mary Shelley’s husband) and Lord Byron (Ada Lovelace’s dad): the personal and insular focus influenced their idea that poets should be a creature of feeling writing for the sake of those feelings, rather than writing to perform. (Poetry Foundation, 2025).   
Even now, over 2,000 years later, her writing is shockingly beautiful, while credit does have to be given to translasters throughout history for keeping her work modern to them, I think they still move me because it’s clear that she felt the same messy, joyous pain that is romantic love3.

    However Sappho’s most prolific legacy is probably as being a massive lesbian, in fact, in many ways, being The Lesbian™, as she is where we get the term form in the first place. While the term originally was used to refer to promiscuous women in general, with Sappho being portrayed as a bit of a slag in the historical(ish) drama The New Comedy written by Mendaner in the 3rd Century BCE. The first use of “lesbian” to refer to a sensible shoe wearing, woman-loving-women, was around 1700, it had become commonplace by the 1800s, and was reclaimed and popularised by activist groups in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s (OED, 2018). All of this has been much a disgrace to the Mayor of Lebsbos, who in one of the more nonsensical episodes of history tried to sue all lesbians in 2008 (Smith, 2008). But I’m getting ahead of myself - back to Ancient Greece. 
 
What’s important to note for the rest of this is that with the Greeks and Romans, the line between history and myth is in many cases very thin and blurry, and in some cases not even there at all. Perhaps that's the nature of any story told over 2000 years ago, perhaps it's the Ancients’ love for moralised stories and fables, or maybe it's just that they had a flair for the dramatic. Wherever these next stories fit on the spectrum between myths and truth, they can still tell us a lot about that world. 

When thinking of Ancient Greece and homosexual the first point of call for many is their system of Pederasty, where Upper class men had sexual relations with prepubescent boys, however I don’t think it would be right to call these relationships queer4. Firstly, not all of these relationships were sexual, it was much more a dynamic of social organisation than it was for pleasure; even the ones that were sexual were still based around power dynamics rather than intimacy or love. Furthermore, gender probably played such a small role in these dynamics as similar relationships were seen between older men and younger women, and all of culture at the time tended more towards a focus on active and passive roles rather than male and female roles (wikipedia, 2025). Therefore leaving sexuality to be much more about the relative power of you and your partner rather than your relative genders. However as Athens became more democratic and prosperity was growing through the social classes, male marriage ages decreased, larger families became desirable and the nuclear family became the predominant social structure, and anything outside of that fell out of favour. Relations between men was described in a 4th Century BCE philosophical text as “beyond nature”. (Hubbard, 2020)

    The Roman Empire was in many ways similar to their neighbours across the Mediterranean that preceded them, notably in how the structure of society was more about power dynamics than it was about men and women. So, the same was true of the little importance of gender in romantic and sexual relationships (Wikipedia, 2025a). However at some point even the Romans were expected to grow and get married to the opposite sex for child rearing, family unitining, political and economic alliance creating purposes. (Wikipedia, 2025b)

    Nevertheless queerness persisted. Because of course it did. In Rome, while not recognised by Roman law, men were getting married to each other, with all the traditional marriage accoutrements including a dowry, and even wedding veil. These exact details are hard to trust considering most information of these ceremonies come from sources that are mocking them, but they did get banned in the 4th century, so they must have been at least a bit of a thing. There are no records of two women getting married in Ancient Rome. Maybe that’s because, like today, where lesbians get married at a much lower rate than gay men, the lesbian were busy rewatching Buffy to partake in what they viewed as patriarchal nonsense5. Or maybe it’s because in a patrilineal society such as Rome, women getting married to each other didn't have much effect on property or wealth so no one bothered to write it down. Despite no lesbian marriages in the Roman empire and Roman poet Ovid decaling that lesbiansism “a desire known to noone” because “among all animals no female is seized by desire for female”6, lesbians were definitely hanging around in Ancient Rome (Wikipedia, 2025c) We know they were reading Sappho form the many Latin translations of her work, and they were writing poetry about each other and scraping it on the walls of Pompeii7  (Wikipedia, 2024),  and in Plato's symposium, Aristophanes’ speech on soul mates, where he recons romantic love is the search for the other half of your soul split from you when Zeus halved each human, he makes it very clear that some women’s soul mates are women. (Lozac'h, 2022)

In Greece the gay men, both real and mythical, were much more into fighting to the death than getting married. After centuries of translation, Homer's Iliad began to take on a new queer life in 2011 with Madeline Miller’s interpretation The Song of Achilles made it very clear that the relationship between Achillies and Patroclus was more than friends. Considering Achilles’s devastation at Patroclus’s death, the fact that avenging his death is the tuning point to a previously unpersuadable Achilles to fight in the Trojan war, and that upon his own death Achilles pleads to be buried with Patrochoclus, I think she was probably onto something. And that’s before even mentioning the fact that Patroclus fought in Achilles armour in hopes it would bring him his strength. This interpretation wasn’t just some new woke reading of the text, spurred on by 21st century cultural sensitivities, even Shakespear was pretty clear these two were banging. In Troilus and Cressida, which he wrote in 1609, the Greek commanders, fed up with Achilles' refusal to fight, said he had become “dainty of his worth” from his time with Patroclus “upon a lazy bed all the livelong day.” (Jones, 2023, pp. 9-12)
A few hundred years later in 371 BCE, Gordidas gathered 150 male couples, known as the Sacred Band of Thebes, to fight the Spatans and defend their city. The queerness and the love of these men were the greatest asset: when writing about them, admittedly 200 years later which probably dampens the accuracy just a bit, philosopher and biographer Plautarch describes “a band held together by the friendship between lovers [that] is not to be broken, since lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other.” Ultimately this band fell to Macedonia in the bloody Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, but a huge marble monument, the Lion of Chadera, still stands in their honor now overlooking their empty graves. (Jones, 2023, pp. 137-141) The restoration of the lion was funded by Order of Chaeronea, a secret society set up to provide support and socialisation to homosexuals in Victorian Britain, where all members vowed, on initiation, “That all real love shall be to you as sanctuary”. (Papadopoulos, 2024)

The Ancient world was also very used to gender nonconformity. I’m not completely sure gender nonconformity is the correct term here considering there was not really a concept of gender to be conformed to in the first place, but it's the only term that feels expansive enough. 
        For starters, it appears predominantly in their myth. Tiresias was an advisor for the Gods, and prophet for Apollo. Some tellings say they could talk to bird, some say they were blind, some say they could tell the future, and some say they travelled through time, but all tellings are clear on the fact that despite being born a man, Hera turned them into a women as punishment for hitting a snake with a stick, and that they could tell the future. In fact their perception from both male and female experience was key in this fortune telling (Jones, 2023, pp 68-72).  Apollo himself, Tiresias’s boss and the God of music, healing and prophecy, is often depicted in statues with feminine clothes and facial features, reflecting the traditionally feminine qualities he was associated with such as healing and music. (Cash, 2023). 
Hermaphroditus was a deity who was the son of Hermes, the God of male sexuality, and Aphrodites, the goddess of female sexuality. He had wings and gained the features of both males and females when the nymph Salmacis, in a fit of undying, unreciprocated love, wished they could become a single being. Hermaphroditus is depicted in all kinds of Roman art, including a life sized statue from the 2nd century CE now in the Louvre, being used as a symbol of subversion gender norms that explores how these norms relate to ourselves and relationship with others. (National Museums Liverpool, 2025, Jones, 2023, pp.64-68) Pliny the Elder also had a medical interest in intersex peoples, that hermaphroditus symbolises, noting that “there are even those who are born of both sexes”, and coined the term “androgyny”, from the Greek word for men “andro”, and women “gyne” (Wikipedia, 2025c)
    Such subversion of gender was often seen as an act of religious and spiritual development bringing them closer to their mythology: it broke down the categories of ordinary human experience, and mirrored the divine, gender-bendy powers of the Gods (Martin, 2016). 

In the Ancient Greek and Roman world people were not just fancying people of the same sex they were writing timeless poetry about it and going to war for each other. And they weren’t just doing a bit of cross dressing, they were actively defying gender norms in an effort to ascend human existence and become more Godly. So even with a different social structure that leads to different interpersonal relationships and ideas of identity, I think it’s safe to say there was queerness floating around in the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago. 

Origionally posted May 2025, but keep having to change dates to keep posts in order.

1. To read more about the method and ethos of writing this history, and about the project in general please read the introduction to this project: ON WRITING QUEER HISTORIES

2. I use BCE and CE rather than BC and AD not out of some anti-religious wokery, but because BC and AD is a system that uses both English and Latin, and using a system that consistently uses one language seems better. 

3. I would strongly encourage everyone to take a side quest into reading more of Sappho’s work, it is stunning. https://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html  

 4. To read more about how I’m using the term “queer”, what it means to me, and what it means within the scope of this project please my introduction to this project: ON WRITING QUEER HISTORIES

5. I joke here but differences in the marriage rate within the queer community, how it reflects relationships to patriarchy, gender roles and family is fascinating and worth a blog post all on its own.

6. Of course this is objectively untrue but I include it because it gives me an excuse to tell one of my top 5 facts about lesbianism: 2 female sheep have very rarely been seen mating and for ages this was a mystery until someone realised that this was probably because to signal desire and readiness for mating ewes will stand completely still staring at eachother, so when two ewes are doing that its unlikely anything will happen. 

7. If you want to read more about Lebians in ancient Rome this Reddit thread is fantastic  https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tu1qpy/how_were_lesbians_viewed_in_ancient_rome/#:~:text=Roman%2Dera%20sources%20variously%20portray,that%20should%20be%20accepted%20as.

Cash, S. 2023. Gender Identities Outside of the Binary Existed in Ancient Rome. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/roch/130/

Hubbard, T. K. 2020. Historical Views of Homosexuality: Ancient Greece. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1242

Jones, D. 2023. Queer Heroes of Myths and Legends. London: Hatchet.

Lozac’h, L. 2022. Homoeroticism in Plato’s ‘Symposium’. https://berkeleyhighjacket.com/column/homoeroticism-in-platos-symposium/

Martin, F. 2016. Ancient History of Cross-Dressing: From Ancient Religions to the Theaters. https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/ancient-history-cross-dressing-ancient-religions-theaters-006559    

Oxford English Dictionary, 2018, “lesbian” (n. & adj.) https://www.oed.com/dictionary/lesbian_n?tab=meaning_and_use&tl=true#39331667

Papadopoulos, G. 2024. The Lion, the “Army of Lovers” and the Order of Chaeronea. https://balkazaar.com/2024/07/07/the-lion-the-army-of-lovers-and-the-order-of-chaeronea/ 

Poetry Foundation, 2025. Sappho. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sappho 

Smith, H. 2008. The Guardian. Gay rights: Lesbos islanders go to court in bid to reclaim the word lesbian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/10/gayrights.greece

Wikipedia, 2024. CIL 4.5296. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIL_4.5296 

Wikipedia, 2025a. Homosexuality in ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greece 

Wikipedia, 2025b. Marriage in ancient Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Rome 

Wikipedia, 2025c. Homosexuality in ancient Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome