The Persian Boy—Mary Renault

[I am reading this 1972 novel in four sections, writing about each section before reading on. So far I have read three section. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the novel as I read it.]

9 January 2026

Chapters 1-8

With not quite a quarter of the novel gone, our young Persian narrator Bagoas is about to be reborn. Just at this moment, as Darius III, the Persian king he has served, is ousted by a rival in his court, things don’t look promising. Bagoas has had to hide under a partially erected field tent to save himself, as though in his grave. ‘When my sepulchre yielded me up, it would be to some fate unknown to me as to the child closed in the womb.’ This is ancient Persia, and Darius has been suffering one humiliation after another as the upstart Macedonian, Alexander, pursues the retreat of his crumbling army to his own palace and beyond.

Bagoas has had a time of it since his father was killed six years before. He had been a good-looking boy, and within a few pages he’s being surgically—and mind-bogglingly painfully—modified to be the sexual plaything of some wealthy man. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will be like a concubine, except not. He won’t fit into the same sexual hierarchy as the women in the harem but, when the time comes, he’s resourceful enough to understand how careful he needs to be not to make enemies in the household. As these chapters go on, it becomes clear how generous Renault has been in endowing him not only with beauty, but with the instinct of a born diplomat. Maybe he’ll be a politician one day, if he can ever be taken seriously. It seems unlikely. Eunuchs have no more status than women in this world.

To a 21st Century reader, this half-century-old novel feels surprisingly modern. Renault, in a gay relationship decades before such a thing was acceptable, has created a strange hybrid world. She portrays the sexual practices of the Ancients matter-of-factly, instead of with the usual kid gloves of the mid-20th Century. Laws had only recently been changed in Britain to allow more sexually explicit content in fiction, but portraying openly gay relationships must have been very rare in 1972, even given the licence of describing the Ancient world.

Renault has a reputation for sticking close to historical facts, so we take it for granted that this is how Darius came to power, and how his poor military judgment in the face of Alexander’s unstoppable expansionism led to him losing it. All that becomes an interesting historical back-story, so the reader can concentrate on Renault’s extraordinary exploration of sexual and gender identity. In Bagoas she’s created an interesting case, the son of a minor landowner brought up in a proudly paternalistic world of strength and prowess. His father hopes for him to be presented at court when he’s old enough, and for ten years, Bagoas is as certain of his heritage and destiny as any son would be. And then he isn’t. The betrayal and death of his father—he had stayed loyal to the wrong man—changes everything. Almost. The soldiers decide to save the pretty boy—and the dealer who buys him changes one last thing.

This is intriguing. Here we have Renault, a gay woman already in her late sixties, putting herself into the mindset of a good-looking, privileged boy, with all the sense of male entitlement that carries with it. It’s a leap—and, for me, she succeeds. She makes her narrator vain and entitled, and this doesn’t change when—slice, slice—suddenly he knows he’ll never be the man he thought he would be. He knows about hierarchies, having been born into a rigidly stratified world, and he can’t imagine life at the bottom. He has no prospects, and finds life as a status trophy for a jewel-dealer’s wife nearly intolerable. But he’s good at hiding it, understanding that all he has at his disposal now are his charm and good looks. By the age of twelve, still ignorant of why eunuch boys have a value for some men, he is dressed up and sent to pleasure one of his owner’s clients.

He’s appalled, of course, but what he doesn’t yet realise is that this is the first step on an extraordinary climb up the social rankings. He’s only a eunuch, and a plaything of these men, but he’s an astute watcher. At first he’s quick to learn because he has to be in order to survive. But soon Renault gives him a mentor, another concubine-style eunuch, who teaches him that there can still be love. This doesn’t happen straight away—he has something like a year of being lent out to satisfy the crude desires of the merchant’s clients—but, luckily, he’s been talent-spotted. The man who buys him, no doubt some kind of secretary, has plenty of money to spend on a fresh recruit. In the house of some hugely wealthy lord, far more luxurious than anything he’s ever seen, he is shown how to be a top-level servant. He grows to like his eunuch teacher—but this is just the start. Enter…

…Oromedon, a beautiful young man, who will teach him far more. He’s only another staging-post on Bagoas’s journey, but Renault makes theirs a loving relationship that has a transformative effect on a scarred young boy. Bagoas is constantly aware of what he has lost, and his ‘gelding’ still causes him terrible pain when Oromedon shows him how there is still physical pleasure to be had. But he reassures Bagoas that this is unusual, and that there must be another cause. ‘It is clear enough what it is. You have fine senses; for pleasure certainly, for pain therefore as much. Though gelding is bad enough for anyone, there are degrees of feeling. It has haunted you ever since, as if it could happen again. That’s not so rare; you’d have got over it long ago, with me. But you have been going with men you despised. Outwardly you had to obey; within, your pride has conceded nothing. You have preferred pain to a pleasure by which you felt degraded. It comes of anger, and the soul’s resistance.’

Wow. That’s some psychological insight in the fourth Century BCE. But I guess we find it acceptable because it’s something like what we want to hear, and there’s no reason to doubt it. Bagoas has been fighting to protect himself from the unending trauma, and now he can learn to work through it. Good old Oromedon—it’s no wonder Bagoas is devastated when he realises he will have to give him up. Because—and nobody has told Bagoas because they didn’t want to freak him out—the who will be taking him into his bed is the king himself.

And… how much more detail do you want? Just as everything that has happened up to now is a kind of prologue for the main action so, in its own way, is everything from now until the coup that ends Darius’ reign. Bagoas learns how to navigate the intricate status battles he constantly encounters, at every level. The servants, whom he carefully avoids making jealous, the harem, who have their own battles in addition to the jealousy they feel of this boy from nowhere, the eunuchs both of the harem and on the diplomatic staff, as jealous as everybody else of whatever status they have—and the politicians. It’s another journey he has to make, learning all the time how to use all his charm and tact with ever more important people.

By the time it starts to become clear that Darius has made too many mistakes ever to halt Alexander’s advance, Renault puts Bagoas in the thick of it. Not in the battles, which he only hears about with the women and staff left behind, but in the hasty diplomatic moves between the different sectors of the army to broker some kind of survivable endgame. At one point, he becomes much more than a go-between. He explains to Artabazos, a venerable but still active politician, that he could speak to Darius in Greek so that Bessos and his cronies wouldn’t understand. This boy, still only sixteen, knows how things work at the highest level now.

Far-fetched? Who cares? If you are re-telling history from the point of view of an imaginary bit-part player, you’re going to have to give him some breaks. And right now, as he lies under that half-assembled tent, he’s going to need a all the breaks he can get.

Chapters 9-16

Hmm. I wish somebody had talked to Mary Renault about pace. Alexander might move fast, but Renault’s novel certainly doesn’t. And I realise I’m not as passionately interested in Classical history as she is. Sure, there are timeless points to be made about the perception of other cultures as they are encountered (or fought, or conquered), and I’ll definitely come back to that. But Bagoas is a narrator of the insides of palaces and tents, and what he has to focus on—what he focuses on through choice, in fact—are the workings of relationships within the inner circle. He only knows about countless history-making marches and battles through his supporting role…

…and maybe that’s why I’m not carried along by the momentum of Alexander’s progress. Bagoas is a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play, and though he’s much more a part of the inner circle than they could ever be, he never participates in the main events. (Also unlike them, we know he isn’t going to be dead at the end.) It also means that we only get a partial—or partisan—account. Bagoas is so besotted by Alexander that it’s hard not to consider this as little more than a hagiography—half-way through the novel, Alexander has never, ever done any wrong. OK, he’s just run through his childhood friend and mentor Kleitos with a spear for insulting him in public, but there isn’t a man there who would blame him. Bagoas’s main misgiving is that a Persian king like Darius would have nodded to a courtier and the man would have been tried and executed next day, in line with the correct protocols. A spear through the chest might be deserved, but it’s not a regal enough gesture for our man.

Man? Well, yes, although the favour he gains from Alexander—Renault gleefully has him take us through every subtle step of his seduction of the great man—doesn’t make him any better than the king’s whore as far as a lot of people are concerned. This is something else that Renault takes her time about. Bagoas’s rise is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. An occasional unspoken acknowledgment by a rival courtier that Bagoas has got something right has to suffice. And meanwhile, he has to use all the skills of diplomacy that he began to learn with Darius to let everyone see how he never tries either to influence Alexander in any way, or to raise himself above his position as the Persian eunuch. Of course, he’s doing both, and it’s Renault’s skill—Bagoas always explains his actions to us, often at some length—that make it seem convincing. But not pacy.

How much do you need to know about the plot? From the folds of the tent where he hides, he gets one of those lucky breaks historical novelists have to give their characters. First, after fighting off (and killing) a would-be rapist, he meets A Greek, Doriskos. He helps him, and eventually leads him to a lord. It’s Nabarzanes, one of the conspirators against Darius, and Bagoas thinks he’s doomed. But Nabarzanes has given up on Bessos, who is merely self-serving, and has no kingly qualities to speak of. He’s going to throw in his lot with Alexander, and realises how useful Bagoas might be as a sweetener. He will be able to give Alexander something he doesn’t realise he needs, he tells our boy—and it turns out he’s right. Nabarzanes gets to go home to his family, and Bagoas gets… not much at first. Alexander has a perfectly sound and trusting relationship with his first love, if that’s what he is, Hephaestion, and there’s no role for Bagoas beyond making himself ornamentally helpful.

And then there is. Bagoas really is good at making the domestic lives of active, strong men comfortable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But he wants more—he’s smitten by Alexander from the start—although he has to time his stealthy progress from servant to lover with laser-like precision. And Renault loves having him describe it. The army, he knows, has a fortnight before they move off on the next part of the march eastwards, and Bagoas does well in his own campaign. He more or less has Alexander exactly where he wants him, notices an opportunity in a loose sandal-string and is about to make a move—but guess who comes along. ‘Having undone the string, I had to do it up again; so Hephaistion was in the room before I could get away. I bowed; he greeted me cheerfully…. So ended the fifth day of fifteen.’ Damn. (I can’t remember which day it is that he actually gets Alexander to take him to his bed. Or is it Bagoas who takes Alexander?)

Is it all like this? The bedroom parts are, pretty much. But there’s a whole world of soldiership that Alexander won’t let him near, game as Bogoas is to die for him if necessary. And there’s a whole world of high-level courtiership that’s closed to him as well—not that he doesn’t listen in whenever he can. It’s something else Renault loves, navigating Bagoas’s route through the documented historical events. Battles, negotiations with this mountain people or that nation of warring factions, Alexander’s genuine closeness to the men in his army, cemented by his willingness to put himself through everything with them. Which, of course, the proselytising Bagoas loves to tell us all about.

And I’m not sure how much I want to add to that. If you want to know about Alexander’s campaigns, I’m sure Wikipedia describes it all in detail. At the point I’ve reached, he’s about to sort out the elusive Bessos, whose army has dwindled almost to nothing. Alexander’s own army is sturdier, but he is constantly faced with the tricky matter of making men with almost unimaginably divergent values think alike. They don’t, and it sometimes seems to reach breaking-point—like when, only partly on Bagoas’s advice, he tries to have men from Greece and Macedonia adopt the Persian form of obeisance to kings. This involves full prostration, and there are influential courtiers who call it blasphemous. Only the gods… etc.

Enough for now. But now I think of it, that little faux pas of Alexander’s, skewering his old pal Kleitos, arose partly out of that mismatch of values. The much older man can remember when Alexander was a child in his father’s house, and tells him to give up his vain posturing. A god? Don’t be ridiculous. OK, perhaps he might have been a bit more tactful about it, but Alexander might have thought of other ways to make sure he didn’t do it again.

Chapters 17-23

To Alexander’s great credit, in Bagoas’s eyes, he can’t forgive himself for killing his old pal in anger. Renault is getting 20th (and now, 21st) Century readers to give our tacit assent the moral standards of a culture in which great men perpetrate what we would consider war crimes and be celebrated for their fairness. And if they don’t kill their enemies when they surrender, but allow them to live prosperously as new allies, well, that’s unaccountable weirdness that only slowly comes to be understood as astute diplomacy. The thing about Alexander’s unprecedented policy of magnanimity in victory is that it works. I don’t know if he invented it, but in Bagoas’s wide-eyed presentation it reveals a god-like wisdom. God-like, and god-given. The last time I wrote, I was fretting away at whether we might be getting little more than a hagiography. Now, I think we know. There never was, and never could be again, a man like Alexander.

In other words, Renault is good at getting us into an alien mindset—or, at least, she never pretends Bagoas, or any of the other characters, could be mistaken for anybody of our own time. His attachment to Persian mores and modes of behaviour, for example, compared to Greek and Macedonian practices he considers barbaric, reminds us that we’re not in 1972 any more. Or, as I write this, 2026. But—and I can’t help doing this when I read historical novels, I’m always looking for the authorial sleight of hand that lets us believe for more than a moment that any of it was really like this. Take, for instance, Alexander’s marriage to the daughter of a defeated enemy king, now an ally. A cynical move? Not at all, in Bagoas’ version. There was no need for him to do it, for instance to cement his power in the region—it’s already set in concrete—so it must have been… what? Love, of course—or the kind of never-before-seen beauty that stuns every man in the room, even men who never take any interest in women. Sure, he never spends as much time with her after the marriage as he does with Bagoas—but Bagoas is happy to tell us it’s because he knows what Alexander needs more than anyone else, including Alexander himself.

Is it soap opera? Yes, and up to a point that’s enough. Renault carries on giving us Bagoas’s narrowly focused account, largely concerned with his own conviction that he is a kind of saviour for Alexander. He never uses the word, but even though he never goes beyond telling us how good his bedroom skills are, he wants to persuade us that Alexander would not be able to survive without him. How many examples of this are there in this quarter of the novel? Not only those times when Bagoas can give the great man comfort when the world seems to press on his shoulders, but to add the final touches to his recovery when he is so badly wounded any other man would have died. The way Bagoas tells it, the most interesting thing about every battle, every new conquest, is the part he plays in keeping the great man going.

Does this make him an unreliable narrator? Renault never asks the question, and I think that’s a pity. It means there’s no exploration of one of the most interesting things about history and novels like this one, the different versions that come down to us. Bagoas often mentions Ptolemy, Alexander’s great general and the chronicler of his conquests, as though to tell us that if we want that kind of history, it’s there for the reading. Which is fine, I suppose, the equivalent of letting us know that we can always look it up in Wikipedia—as I already have, the in the first part of this commentary. This is a different kind of chronicle, a point Bagoas never makes for himself. A different author, or Renault on a different day, might have had some fun puncturing Bagoas’s vanity. And it would have added to the interest of his account if we had been invited to ponder on the limited scope of his point of view. But no.

Do I need to write about the details of Alexander’s unstoppable progress east in these chapters? I’m not sure I do. These particular enemies—everybody’s an enemy to Alexander, not that he ever says it out loud—are quarrelsome, whereas these are militaristic and merciless. These are not to be trusted, which is their loss, because Alexander punishes treachery without mercy. (He’s unfashionably generous to new allies who realise they’re much better off sticking with him.) Perhaps his most daunting enemy, an Indian king waiting for him on the other side of the Ganges, is so well resourced—and mounted on elephants, for goodness’ sake—he has been unconquerable until now. Each one demands a different strategy, and Renault has Bagoas sketch in the main points. Siege, open battle, stealth or, in xxx’s case, mind-games to confuse his opponent that would make Muhammad Ali proud. Talk about float like a butterfly.

And India is as far as Alexander goes. He wants to press on to the sea, certain that his old teacher Aristotle’s map of the world is completely right in showing it well within reach. (Bagoas reminds us that ‘one thing was sure; he had never been to look.) But, for the first time ever, Alexander has misjudged his army’s mood. He knows he will be able to persuade them—when has he ever failed?—but he’s wrong. Cue soul-searching, scrupulous desire to be seen to listen to the men’s concerns… and he can’t argue them out of their overwhelming desire to see their families again and settle down back home. Bagoas lets us know that this is a turning-point, and not only literally. It’s as though Alexander, unstoppable when he had an almost messianic sense of purpose, now has to press back through half the known world. Damn.

And it isn’t at all straightforward. They go back a different way, swinging south (and this is where I really found this Wikipedia map useful), and there are new enemies to subdue. Alexander is still the army’s hero, and they fight as hard as ever for him… but it’s as though he wants to prove that none of his old conquering powers have left him. Does Bagoas write this? I can’t remember—but whether he does or not, it nearly kills Alexander. They’ve come to the best-defended citadel ever, and he leads his men to the foot of an inner wall. He’s the first up a ladder that isn’t fully in place, others follow, and just as he reaches the top, it collapses. He has time to leap over the parapet… etc. Others follow, and they win the day, but Alexander has a terrible wound, a barbed arrow lodged in his side and piercing a lung.

It’s unapologetically heroic stuff, but now it’s Bagoas’s time to shine. The doctor does a good job in removing as much of the arrow as he can, but—and I can’t remember the details—it’s Bagoas who can help Alexander through the excruciating final minutes of the field operation. And everybody realises, even Hephaestion, that Bagoas is the one to nurse Alexander back to health. Of course, nobody can stop him rising within days, far too soon, to make a great show of how it will take more than a rib-splintering arrow to keep him down. He has to be seen sitting erect on his horse, to walk the final steps to the tent where he can hear representations… and so on. The injury will never fully heal, and there will always be deep, painful scarring on the ribcage and lung, but you wouldn’t know to look at him. Bless.

Is Bagoas presenting himself as more than Alexander’s lover and helpmeet? He notices important things that others miss, like the conspiratorial way the philosopher Kallisthenes, earlier in these chapters, speaks to the squires he’s training up. He, Bagoas, is now as well-versed in the Greek classics as anybody, and realises Kallisthenes has modified a story of good faith into one of heroic treachery. Is it Bagoas who saves Alexander? He is vigilant enough to notice when the squires are waiting to kill Alexander, and makes sure Alexander stays later at the feast he’s hosting. Bagoas lets us know how generous Alexander is in reminding him of how he had always had his suspicions, and regrets not getting rid of Kallisthenes sooner. It’s maybe the best proof yet of Bagoas’s matchlessness.

Enough? An awful lot of stuff happens, but the main trajectory is to do with how Bagoas, a constant support for the great man in his triumphs, has now become even more valuable in keeping him from danger. The Greek intellectuals have been looking on jealously—Kallisthenes had been in correspondence with Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher and philosophical hero—and Bagoas helps him to realise it’s unwise to rely on old certainties. Alexander needs to think for himself, and who better to help him to do it than the Persian boy? What a guy.