There's a long tradition of "Alexander romances" that became popular almost from the time of his death up through the medieval era in multiple places and languages. Some of them are really strange, and most are sadly known only by other people talking about them; this is one of the things that makes it hard to know much about Alexander himself, because even people trying to write biographies (or hagiographies, practically) cited details from the romance tradition as fact--such as the idea that Alexander was the son of Zeus (which, to be fair, was a rumor that Alexander himself encouraged during his lifetime). History almost immediately became overlaid with legend. Some of the romances play up Hephaistion's role and others play it down, but it's not quite on the level of slash in fandom today, sadly (or if it was, it didn't survive--what we don't have dwarfs what existed).
That said, though, Alexander and Hephaistion explicitly compared themselves to Achilles and Patroclus, and encouraged others to do the same. On one level the entire epic cycle (which is not completely extant) is just Homer fanfic, or mythology fanfic if you want to look at it that way (since "Homer" himself was drawing on an existing, bilingual [Greek and Hittite] corpus of legends in epic verse). I think in the ancient world the idea that Achilles and Patroclus were a pairing was fairly well understood, and quite frankly I'd be surprised if someone hadn't written something explicit about them somewhere, particularly in the Roman period, but again I don't think anything has survived. Maybe in the graffiti in Pompeii? I don't think that's been completely published yet. ETA: From what little I know, most pornography in the ancient world was visual, because most people couldn't read. There are also issues of class in what survives--the Romance languages grew out of the so-called "vulgar Latin" that was being spoken by poorer, less educated people even in the early imperial period (reign of Augustus onward, I mean), but that was rarely written down by the people who could write, Petronius' The Satyricon being the most notable exception. /eta
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There's a long tradition of "Alexander romances" that became popular almost from the time of his death up through the medieval era in multiple places and languages. Some of them are really strange, and most are sadly known only by other people talking about them; this is one of the things that makes it hard to know much about Alexander himself, because even people trying to write biographies (or hagiographies, practically) cited details from the romance tradition as fact--such as the idea that Alexander was the son of Zeus (which, to be fair, was a rumor that Alexander himself encouraged during his lifetime). History almost immediately became overlaid with legend. Some of the romances play up Hephaistion's role and others play it down, but it's not quite on the level of slash in fandom today, sadly (or if it was, it didn't survive--what we don't have dwarfs what existed).
That said, though, Alexander and Hephaistion explicitly compared themselves to Achilles and Patroclus, and encouraged others to do the same. On one level the entire epic cycle (which is not completely extant) is just Homer fanfic, or mythology fanfic if you want to look at it that way (since "Homer" himself was drawing on an existing, bilingual [Greek and Hittite] corpus of legends in epic verse). I think in the ancient world the idea that Achilles and Patroclus were a pairing was fairly well understood, and quite frankly I'd be surprised if someone hadn't written something explicit about them somewhere, particularly in the Roman period, but again I don't think anything has survived. Maybe in the graffiti in Pompeii? I don't think that's been completely published yet. ETA: From what little I know, most pornography in the ancient world was visual, because most people couldn't read. There are also issues of class in what survives--the Romance languages grew out of the so-called "vulgar Latin" that was being spoken by poorer, less educated people even in the early imperial period (reign of Augustus onward, I mean), but that was rarely written down by the people who could write, Petronius' The Satyricon being the most notable exception. /eta