James M. Saslow

This note does not only illuminate possible attitudes of generational difference or maybe age-based practices, but it demonstrates varying degrees of acceptance and risk in the public display of sodomite themes in Renaissance Italy, which appears forcefully in the Alexander Frescoes in the Villa Farnesina.

To contextualize this, In Sodoma's Rome, because of course Rome and Siena and Florence all have different practices, when Michelangelo relocated to Rome in the 1490s, the Renaissance historian James Saslow describes how the social environment reconciled antiquity with Sodomite visibility.

Saslow says, quote, from the 1490s into the 1520s, high Renaissance Rome tolerated a hedonistic That's what we're talking about here, guys.

With this in mind, even Raphael and his assistants did not shy away from homoerotic themes in the frescoes that we discussed in the last episode.

And the immediate hurricane of online rebuttals of this interpretation was saturating the internet.

Alexander did indeed in his life have three wives at the same time, one of which, Roxanna, is a key figure of Sodom's frescoes.

So now, I'm not an ancient historian.

But there are many who today sustain that Hephaestion was Alexander's life partner.