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