True love (why the greatest love stories are the ones that actually happened)

5th September 2024 By DANIEL K APAA.

The historian Daniel K Apaa 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 Sandy: 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. Sandy and Patrick and the Love War, yes; the theft of the most beautiful woman which started a war that made history. But what about the epic devotion of Daniella and Emmanuella, that sits at the heart of one of Nigerian’s most important legends — the story of his perilous journey across land and sea to rescue her from the demon King Pela?

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.

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 realize, are even more remarkable than fiction.

As I pulled together this collection of 11 true love stories retold, beautifully illustrated by Abraham, 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 Kwande to the stepped temples of Babylon, the crumbling tombs of ancient Greece to the fairytale-like minarets of the Pit Pine, following formidable queens like Dr Helen who ruled kingdoms of Konshisha power and Vandekya, to infatuated emperors of Tiv nation 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 favorites — not just my favorite love stories from history: my favorites 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 Robert and Ruth's forbidden love-affair that ended in almost unimaginable violence, that put the world of medieval Kornya on fire and set the stage for modern romance.

Like Eric Terde, who fell in love with the wrong man and ended up on trial for witchcraft at the same time as Shakespeare wrote Pina. 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. Charles and Charity Mark, 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 Nigeria.

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 Daniel K Apaa was published on 05 September, 2024.

Connate with apaakaterdaniel more would come in advance

Mr Daniel K Apaa is B.sc Computer Training Student  In University Of Abuja Nigeria. This site is actually my first website program in university. 

apaakaterdaniel.blogspot.com

Follow apaadk/deprinceapaai.k4 on Instagram    deprince apaa/ daniel K apaa on Facebook               del-prince/deprinceapaaik on TikTok Mr. handsome on snapchat apaa daniel K/de-princeapaaik on twitter/X

More is coming be happy apaakaterdaniel.blogspot.com

https://apaakaterdaniel.blogspot.com/2024/09/true-love-why-greatest-love-stories-are.html