Few things in this world are as democratic as a sexual perversion: it respects no class, no era, no geography. But some of them have the dubious honour of arriving with a birth certificate, a surname and even a forwarding address. Sadism we owe to the Marquis de Sade. Masochism to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. And candaulism —that peculiar habit of displaying one's own partner naked for somebody else to gape at— we owe, dear reader, to a certain Candaules, King of Lydia, who around 680 B.C. became the first man in recorded history to turn third-party voyeurism into official palace policy.
The poor fellow played the hand so spectacularly badly that he managed to lose, in one single evening, his crown, his dynasty, his marital bed and his throat. All of it thanks to one erotic whim — and to a red-haired woman called Nyssia who turned out to be considerably less naive, and considerably more dangerous, than he ever suspected.
Let me tell you how.
Welcome to Sardis, 680 B.C.
For context: Lydia was a wealthy kingdom, sitting comfortably on heaps of gold, tucked into what today is western Turkey. Its capital was Sardis, and its king, Candaules, son of Myrsus, was the last sovereign of the Heraclid dynasty — that is, the alleged descendants of the mythical strongman Hercules. Yes, that Hercules, the one Disney made a cartoon about. His ancestors had been ruling there for over five hundred years by oracular decree from Apollo himself, which, dynastically speaking, is a fairly comfortable tenure.
Well then. After twenty-two generations of sober, sensible, competent kings, the crown landed on Candaules' head. And with Candaules, as we shall see, the whole operation went down the drain in the course of a single night.
The obsessed husband and the trusted friend
The king had an intimate friend and man of absolute trust, a former military man called Gyges, son of Dascylus, with whom he shared everything from matters of state to his most private confidences. And among those confidences was one that Candaules refused to stop repeating, Sunday after Sunday: that his wife, Queen Nyssia, was the single most spectacularly beautiful creature ever to have walked the Earth.
And according to the good master Herodotus —with whom I have the honour of chatting across the centuries in my books, as if we were two old drinking buddies in a bar in Halicarnassus— he wasn't lying. Nyssia was a young redhead with hair down to her waist, emerald-green eyes, endless legs, porcelain skin freckled like a Tuscan fresco, and a magnetism so fierce that merely walking past a man was enough to reduce him to stammering. One of those women who walk into a room and the oxygen takes sides.
The problem is that Candaules, instead of contenting himself with being the luckiest chap in the palace —which he was—, developed a growing obsession: he needed somebody else to confirm it. And not in words. With their eyes.
The king's "erotic whim"
One fine day, after yet another of his customary monologues extolling his wife's beauty, Candaules dropped on poor Gyges the sentence that was about to rearrange the lives of every character in this story:
"I see, my dear friend Gyges, that no matter how often I say it, you cannot be made to believe how beautiful my wife truly is. And since men tend to give less credence to their ears than to their eyes, this very night I shall arrange things so that she, without knowing it, shall appear before your gaze in all her magnificent glory, stark naked, just as a god made her."
— Candaules of Lydia, unwitting founder of candaulism
Gyges, understandably, leapt backwards as if someone had pressed a live coal to the back of his neck. No, sire; a woman, when she slips off her gown, slips off with it her decency and her honour; let each man be content with his own and never cast his eyes upon another's; please, please, do not force him into such an outrage.
But here, dear reader, the story has more meat on its bones than first appears. Because everything indicates —and this my master Herodotus and I reconstruct in the book, applying the very ancient and very modern art of common sense— that our Gyges had already been, for several months, the queen's lover. In other words: when Candaules proposed spying on her naked, Gyges not only had zero curiosity on the matter, he was utterly petrified, absolutely convinced that his king was setting an elaborate trap to uncover the identity of the man sleeping with his wife.
Spoiler: it was no trap. It was simply that Candaules had gone completely off his rocker.
The night it all went sideways
That very night, the king hid Gyges behind the door of the royal bedchamber. The plan was simple: Nyssia would enter, undress before the bronze mirror, Gyges would contemplate her in silence just long enough to be dazzled, and then, as she turned her back to climb into bed, Gyges would slip out the way he had come in. An impeccable operation. What modern soldiers would call "clean as a whistle".
And there, lit only by the trembling glow of frankincense candles, emerged Nyssia Gymnaica —the naked queen, as we would christen her afterwards— letting down her bun and beginning to brush that river of fire-red hair before the mirror. Gyges, shielded behind the door, heart pounding its way out of his chest, contemplated her transfixed. Though —let us not forget— it wasn't his first time. Not by a long shot.
Incidentally —and I mention this as a treat for readers with an art-historical bent—, over the centuries this scene earned itself a place in the museums of Europe. The English painter William Etty painted it in 1830, and the canvas hangs today in the Tate Britain in London. It caused such a scandal among Victorian critics that even one of Etty's most devoted defenders, Alexander Gilchrist, was forced to admit it was "almost the only instance among Etty's works, of an undeniably disagreeable, not to say objectionable subject having been chosen as the theme for interpreting nude form". In short: two and a half millennia after the crime, Nyssia was still making Englishmen uncomfortable. Beauty, apparently, does not expire.
The problem is that the palaces of Antiquity, rather like modern open-plan offices, were crammed with maids, courtiers and professional busybodies; and it is more than likely that some doorkeeper loyal to the queen had warned her that very afternoon of the peculiar business her husband was brewing. (Or indeed that she herself, already aware of her husband's murky little vice, had smelt it out on her own.) Because when she finished dressing… I mean, undressing, and before making for the bed where her scandalously aroused husband awaited, Nyssia saw, out of the corner of her eye, Gyges slipping away through the door.
And she said nothing. Not a gesture. Not a gasp. Not so much as a raised eyebrow.
She climbed into bed, feigned perfect normality, even joked with Candaules, even made love to him as if nothing had happened. And waited for dawn.
The redheaded queen and the ultimatum
Here is where the story stops being a palace anecdote about a lovesick erotomaniac and turns into a Greek tragedy with a taste of cold steel.
The following morning, before the king had even woken up, Nyssia summoned Gyges as a matter of urgency. The poor man arrived without suspecting a thing —after all, for months now the queen had been calling him to private audiences for reasons, shall we say, extracurricular—. And the moment he stepped into the hall, without wasting a single courtesy, she hit him point-blank:
"I know everything, Gyges! There is no other way out now. Today you will choose between the two options I am about to offer you, and I don't care which. Either tonight you kill my husband, seize the kingdom of the Lydians, and —since you have already seen me naked— take me as your lawful wife... or here and now you die yourself, this instant, so that you never again lay eyes on what is forbidden to you: the body of your queen unclothed."
— Nyssia Gymnaica, Queen of Lydia and uncompromising negotiator
Gyges froze stiffer than a marble statue. He tried to reason, to stammer, to plead, to suggest a third option, to haggle, to renegotiate the timeline. Nothing. Nyssia had made up her mind and, as you may have guessed, the little queen wasn't one for half measures. So, applying the very human principle that it is better to kill than to die, Gyges accepted the assignment.
"Tell me then, my lady, since you force me against all my will to give a horrible and unjust death to your husband, how are we to do it?"
And she, laughing with delight —laughing with delight, I repeat— answered: "Why, we'll do it tonight, in the very same spot where that pervert prostituted me naked before your eyes. Right there, in our marriage bed, you will take him by surprise while he sleeps, you will wake him so he sees me for a few seconds, and then you will slit his throat in front of me."
What a piece of work the redheaded queen, friends. I swear upon the gods of Olympus I should not have cared to have her as an enemy.
The regicide in slow motion
That night, around eleven, Candaules withdrew to his chambers exhausted after a long day of signing death sentences, arguing with foreign ambassadors and arbitrating land disputes. He hadn't the faintest notion that the last sentence of the day would be his own.
A loyal maid, one of Nyssia's internal operatives, confirmed that the king was already fast asleep, snoring like a diesel truck with its mouth hanging open. The queen and Gyges then climbed the staircase to the royal chambers in silence. On the way up, Nyssia drew from under her tunic a long ceremonial bronze dagger, its blade covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and placed it in her lover's hand. A fine weapon, pretty, and —crucially— perfectly sharpened.
She hid Gyges behind the very same door where, twenty-four hours earlier, he had watched his queen undress at her husband's command. Pure dramatic symmetry. The best HBO screenwriter could not have scripted it better.
Nyssia approached the bed, checked millimetre by millimetre that Candaules was sleeping the sleep of the just, turned towards the door and, looking at Gyges, began calmly to brush her hair. That was the signal. Gyges sprang like a coiled steel spring, swift as a cat, rounded the bed, clapped one hand over the king's mouth while gripping his neck with the other. Candaules, in his last conscious second of life, surrounded by darkness, had time to see only one thing: the emerald-green eyes of his wife gleaming in the shadows, and the face of her perfect satisfaction. And then, the bronze edge of the Egyptian dagger opened his throat cleanly, from left to right.
Gyges dragged the body off the bed to avoid staining with blood what would, from that night onwards, be his new chamber. The king is dead. Long live the new king. The Heraclid dynasty was over. The dynasty of the Mermnadae had begun.
Epilogue: bribed oracles and a vengeance on instalments
But of course, coups d'état in Antiquity had their formalities, and it was not enough to slit a throat in private: the thing had to be legitimised. The Lydian nobles, enraged, came within an inch of rising up in arms to avenge their late king. They would have made short work of Gyges, had it not been decided to submit the matter to the Oracle of Delphi, which in those days served as the Supreme Court of the known world.
And here a juicy little detail enters the plot: Nyssia, no fool for a second time, had kept sole knowledge of the location of Candaules' personal treasury —pure insider information, family monopoly—. With those coffers of gold and silver at his disposal, the freshly-minted Gyges was able to persuade the priests of Delphi with arguments at once very solid, very heavy and very shiny. The Pythia, by sheer coincidence, delivered a favourable oracle. Gyges was confirmed king.
That said, the oracle —so as not to entirely displease the supporters of the old dynasty— added a bit of small print: the Heraclids would be avenged, but not now. Vengeance would come exactly five generations later. A prophecy to which nobody paid the slightest attention… until, two centuries down the line, the last descendant of Gyges, one Croesus, lost everything to Cyrus of Persia. But that, dear reader, is another story — one I shall tell you in due course.
And thus candaulism was born
Twenty-six centuries after that blood-soaked night in Sardis, psychology manuals still use the word candaulism to describe the paraphilia that consists of becoming sexually excited by exhibiting one's own partner —naked, or in intimate situations— to the gaze of others. A rather dubious linguistic honour, it must be said, but one that Candaules earned at full price. In blood. His own, moreover.
Moral of the tale —if tales about voyeuristic kings are entitled to a moral—: there are whims that come expensive, there are women who do not forgive, and there are friends who, when forced to choose between killing and dying, choose the former with surprising alacrity.
And above all: when your wife is a redhead with emerald-green eyes, do not show her to anybody. Count your blessings. Shut the door. And sleep easy.
Candaules did not. And he paid the price.