The historian Emily Hauser explains why tales of true love – love that really happened – make the greatest love stories of all.
“I’m in love”: it’s a phrase that’s been said since the beginning of time. We all care about love, and all of us want more of it in our lives — whether that’s the love of our parents, our friends and family, our lovers, our partners.
Love drives world religions; it’s caused wars; it’s raised monuments to the skies and burned cities to the ground. Just think of Helen of Troy: the most beautiful woman in the world, the face that launched a thousand ships, that started a ten-year war that was one of the greatest battles the world had ever seen — and in so doing, made a legend.
And love lies at the heart of some of the oldest myths and greatest stories ever told. Helen and Paris and the Trojan War, yes; the theft of the most beautiful woman which started a war that made history. But what about the epic devotion of Rama and Sita, that sits at the heart of one of India’s most important legends — the story of his perilous journey across land and sea to rescue her from the demon King Ravana?
What about Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s tragedy of two star-crossed lovers who fell for each other against all the odds, despite the hatred of their families — and paid the price? What about Beauty and the Beast, where love has the power to see beyond appearances and break an ancient curse? Love stories really are a tale as old as time.
And yet love isn’t just a fairy tale. When I started researching for my latest non-fiction book aimed at a younger audience, Ancient Love Stories, and began to look harder at the love stories that history has to tell us — the real tales of real people who fell in love — I discovered what, to me, as an avid reader of ancient myths and legends, was something of a revelation.
Some of these stories were even better than the ones I’d grown up with. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that some of the greatest love stories are the ones that actually happened.
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Because these are the love stories that really did come true.
Ancient Love Stories brings together some of the most remarkable real romances in history — from tales of fearless queens and besotted emperors, to men who died fighting for the men they loved. These are the actual love stories of true love that, in lots of ways, I came to realise, are even more remarkable than fiction.
As I pulled together this collection of 11 true love stories retold, beautifully illustrated by Sander Berg, I wanted to take readers on a journey across three thousand years of falling in love, voyaging through an incredible range of cultures in search of history’s greatest love stories: moving from the mountains of China to the stepped temples of Babylon, the crumbling tombs of ancient Greece to the fairytale-like minarets of the Taj Mahal, following formidable queens like Cleopatra who ruled kingdoms of unimaginable power and wealth, to infatuated emperors of Rome who turned their lovers into icons almost as famous as Jesus himself, to men who fought against Alexander the Great and died to protect the men they loved.
Some of these stories became my favourites — not just my favourite love stories from history: my favourite ever love stories.
Take, for example, the last in the list: the band of three hundred ancient Greek warriors, known as the Sacred Band of Thebes — a fearsome crack team of soldiers that was made up entirely of 150 pairs of male lovers.
The theory went (and it was one endorsed by Plato, pupil of Socrates and Greece’s great philosopher) that you’d fight harder, and be more willing to die, to save someone you loved. Clearly, it was a good theory: throughout the fourth century BC, as they swiped and stabbed their way across Greece, the Sacred Band went (incredibly) undefeated for nearly forty years.
But then there’s the best bit: when they finally fell in battle, refusing to abandon each other to the very end, they were given a soldier’s burial there on the battlefield where Alexander the Great’s forces had cut them down. Over two thousand years later their bodies were discovered and dug up again, their skeletons laid out in rows like they were marching into war.
And several of them had been buried holding hands.
It’s details like that — physical reminders that love can and will transcend the centuries — that give me actual chills, and make me think that these really are the greatest love stories of all. But it’s not just about queens and kings and soldiers.
There are also the little-known love stories, the ones that were forgotten or weren’t thought important enough to make the history books, that have hidden behind closed doors for hundreds of years — like the scandalous, bloody, passionate story of Eloise and Abelard’s forbidden love-affair that ended in almost unimaginable violence, that put the world of medieval France on fire and set the stage for modern romance.
Like Frances Howard, who fell in love with the wrong man and ended up on trial for witchcraft at the same time as Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. Like Ignatius Sancho and Anne Osborne, who fell in love in a grocer’s shop in 18th-century London and made history when Anne published her husband’s letters, becoming the first Black publisher in the western world.
And then there are the real lovers who broke boundaries: Sappho, the first woman poet of ancient Greece, trailblazer, rulebreaker and poet of women’s love. Hadrian, whose obsessive infatuation saw him turn his young male lover into a god and wrote their romance across the world stage for all to see. Cleopatra and Mark Antony, whose explosive love-affair took down two of history’s greatest empires with it.
But it’s not just the realness of it that gets me, or the chance to listen to the voices of extraordinary people and their extraordinary tales that we’d forgotten. It’s not just how love shows us how to cut up the history books and write our own stories.
It’s the fact that true love stories give us actual, living proof, written into the annals of the past, that there’s not just one way of being in love — and there never has been.
Real love is as diverse, as individual, and as fascinating, as the billions of people who have lived and loved on this planet across the millennia.
Each story is different and comes with its own plotlines, its own cast of characters, its own dramatic backdrop. Each story is unique. It’s all the real people from history, who have lived and loved in their own ways, who show that better than anyone.
And that, to me, is true love.
Ancient Love Stories by Emily Hauser was published on 28 September, 2023.
Read more about this book.
Emily Hauser is an award-winning classicist and the author of the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy retelling the stories of the women of Greek myth. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and in the Guardian alongside Natalie Haynes and Colm Tóibín, and her debut novel For the Most Beautiful was listed among the 28 Best Books for Summer in the Telegraph.
Follow Emily on Instagram
Have a look at Emily’s features about women in Ancient Greek myths:
Troy: an ancient story for a modern age
Amazon Warrior Women: The Truth Behind the Myth (One of our most popular features)
Jason, the Argonauts – and a Woman? (Another of our top features)
Women of the Trojan War
Some other features you may like:
Frances Howard features in Five infamous female poisoners by Elizabeth Fremantle
Vanity project or lasting legacy – was Hadrian’s Wall worth all the effort? by Douglas Jackson
Merkins and masochists: a brief history of sex by Jemahl Evans
And a fictionalised version of Ignatius Sancho’s life, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph, won this year’s HWA Debut Crown Award
Images:
- Ignatius Sancho, Anne Osborne and their children by Sander Berg
- Marriage of Rama to Sita with Brahmins making fire sacrifice: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- Probable posthumous portrait of Cleopatra VII, Herculaneum, 1st century: National Archaeological Museum of Naples via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
- Two skeletons from the Band of Thebes graves by Sander Berg
- Abelard and Eloise from a manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, 14th century: Musée Condé via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Kalpis painting of Sappho by the Sappho Painter, c510BC: National Museum, Warsaw via Wikimedia (public domain)
