Bagoas (disambiguation)

Bagoas or Bageus was a title or honorific in Ancient Persia denoting a eunuch who acted as a sort of viceroy for the king. According to 1st-century Roman author Pliny the Elder, "Bagoas" merely meant "eunuch", but modern scholars note that every Bagoas mentioned throughout history (who was a real and not fictional person) wielded considerable power and influence, generally on the behalf of some ruler.

There are numerous persons described in ancient sources as being named "Bagoas":

Historical figures

• Bagoas the Persian, 5th-century governor of the Achaemenid province of Yehud, known from the Elephantine papyri
• Bagoas, in charge of the affairs of Holofernes in the Book of Judith
• Bageus, dispatched in 404 BC by Persian statesman Pharnabazus II to assassinate Alcibiades
• Bagoas (died 336 BC) was a Persian minister of Artaxerxes III
• Bagoas (courtier), a favorite of Alexander the Great
• Bagoas, a minor figure in the Mithridatic Wars who in 90 BCE drove out Ariobarzanes I of Cappadocia
• Bagoas, eunuch of Herod the Great, executed in the 1st century BCE for conspiring against his king
• Bagous, a bedchamber attendant in the poem Amores by Ovid
• Bagoas, the fictional main character of The Eunuch, a parable by the 2nd century writer Lucian
• Bagoas, character in the novel Aethiopica , by 3rd-century writer Heliodorus of Emesa

Other

• Abrial A-12 Bagoas, a French experimental glider of the 1930s

See also

• Bagous , a genus of beetle