The elite ancient Greek fighting force made up entirely of gay couples

Theban commander Pelopidas leads the Sacred Band in a charge against the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. A thousand Spartan soldiers, trained for combat from the age of 7, were returning from an expedition when they stumbled on a much smaller force from the rival city of Thebes. Rather than retreat, the Theban infantry charged, pulling into a close formation and piercing the Spartan lines like a spear. The Spartans turned and, for the first time ever in pitched battle, fled.

Every Spartan boy spent his childhood at a state-sponsored military boarding school called the agōgē, and every Spartan man was a lifelong soldier. The Thebans couldn’t compete with that scale of military training, so a commander named Gorgidas suggested that they deploy a uniquely Theban strength against their enemies: male erotic love.

Achilles, champion of the Trojan War, went willingly to his death to avenge Patroclus, with whom prominent Greek writers believed he was romantically involved. Lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton were celebrated as the founders of Athenian democracy for killing Hipparchus, brother of Athens’s last tyrant. And according to Plutarch, Heracles had too many male lovers to count.

Normally in Greek phalanx warfare, the strongest troops were positioned on the right side of the battle formation. Instead, Epaminondas placed the Sacred Band and the bulk of his infantry on his army’s left wing so they would be opposite Sparta’s best. If they could defeat the Spartan core, he believed, the rest of the enemy force — mostly unenthusiastic allies — would cut and run.

Alexander’s father, King Philip II, had transformed Macedonia from an insignificant kingdom on the edge of the Greek world into a burgeoning imperial power, and in 338 B.C. he attacked a coalition of southern Greek city-states, including Thebes, at Chaeronea.

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