From Intimate Conflict to Political Act

In 514 BCE, during the Panathenaia, the great civic and religious festival, Harmodios and Aristogeiton attempted to strike down the two brothers⁹. Their primary target was Hippias, the ruling tyrant, but the plot partially failed and it was Hipparchos who was killed. Harmodios was slain immediately, while Aristogeiton was arrested, tortured, and executed shortly thereafter. Tradition reports that the immediate trigger was an offense that directly affected their relationship. Hipparchos is said to have sought to seduce Harmodios and, after being rebuffed, publicly humiliated his sister during a procession. The injury to the couple’s honor, to eros and to the implicit rules governing relations between citizens, thus transformed into a rejection of tyranny¹⁰.

Civic Recognition of a Male Couple

The tyranny did not fall immediately. Hippias remained in power until 510 BCE, when he was overthrown. Yet from the establishment of democracy onward, Athens elevated Harmodios and Aristogeiton as founding heroes. Their memory was honored with a bronze statue erected in the Agora, with civic privileges granted to their descendants, and with banquet songs, the skolia, which celebrated their deed as the symbolic origin of equality before the law¹¹. This glorification did not retain only the political act; it also magnified the masculine union itself. Love between men appears here as a formative force of virtue, a source of courage, loyalty, and sacrifice, and as one of the sites where Athens bound eros and aretē, desire and moral excellence, in the service of freedom.

Middle Ages and Antiquity

Harmodios and Aristogeiton appear in this Gothic stained glass as transitional figures. They embody the Middle Ages’ capacity to absorb Antiquity and to transform it into a reservoir of moral exempla¹². Their presence suggests that such a stained glass window could have existed, even if its actual realization would have been rendered problematic by the dominant values of the period.

Moral Limits of the Middle Ages

For the Middle Ages cannot, in themselves, be taken as a model of exemplary morality. Politically, tyranny was often conceived as a legitimate form of power, willed or permitted by God, and the very idea of political resistance remained largely suspect. Likewise, homosexuality, though omnipresent in social practices and in courtly or clerical cultures, was officially condemned, concealed, reinterpreted, or denied¹³. That a loving male couple, even sublimated into amicitia, a virile and spiritual friendship, could be integrated into a sacred iconographic program therefore belongs to the realm of conjecture.

The Truly Timeless Values

It is precisely this tension that makes such a stained glass intellectually and symbolically powerful. By contrast, it reveals that medieval hostility toward homosexuality was neither universal nor timeless, but historically situated, just like the relative acceptance of tyranny¹⁴. By invoking Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the image recalls that love between men has, at times, been publicly praised as a source of civic virtue, courage, and freedom¹⁵, and that certain ancient values, the union of bodies, masculine solidarity, the refusal of oppression, may appear, in retrospect, more emancipatory than those of later eras¹⁶.