#275: LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!  Reading around in classical history, you may well have run across references to a particular military troop of the city-state of Thebes, 300 soldiers—more specifically and unusually, 150 pairs of male lovers.  The rationale for this was the notion that no man would want to abandon his lover in the battlefield, or be seen by him in any act of cowardice.  The troop’s existence is attested to in Plutarch, in Xenophon and a few others; further evidence came with the uncovering, in 1880, of a common grave of 254 of these soldiers, laid side by side, some with their arms linked.  For decades they had been the star, unbeatable regiment in defense of Thebes; the grave was dug in 338 BC, after the troop was defeated and destroyed by the enormous armies of Alexander the Great.  James Romm, in his book The Sacred Band, has given us, in a readable and intelligent narrative history, the story of these soldiers, and the story of the power struggles of the time, between Sparta and Athens and Thebes.  The narrative is lucid and well-structured, and the pace is readable and brisk. The place of the individual characters is nicely prepared; the larger political story may sometimes eclipse the story of the band itself, but this is the world they lived in, and their raison d’être.

       The whole notion is arresting and profoundly unmodern, when homosexuality is often still associated with effeminacy.  The samurai of Japan would not have found the Theban idea strange, but I can’t imagine it going over well with our current military leaders (I invite you to think of suggesting such a troop to Pete Hegseth).  Casual readers in the history of the period tend to assume that the attitude towards homosexuality was a relaxed and consistent tolerance, but Romm demonstrates that things were a good deal more complicated: there were regional differences and hierarchies in the accepted sexual roles; Sparta and even the less militant Athens were both skittish on the subject. Thebes was unusual in that they recognized long-term same-sex relationships.  Men lived together in life-long unions, and would go the tomb in Thebes of Iolaus, thought to be Heracles’s beloved, to pledge their love.   Romm specifically reminds us that our modern notion of Platonic love, which we assume to mean a spiritual and specifically non-physical affection, is a misreading we inherit from the Renaissance; the term as used by Plato himself suggested that erôs between two men could lead to a transcendent, spiritual illumination.  Here you may begin to sense the line between tolerance and true acceptance.

        The survival of any memory of the troop was as fragile as all remembering is.  Xenophon, being staunchly pro-Sparta, downplayed the troop’s existence and triumphs.  Time had erased all sign of their common grave, until in the nineteenth century one shard of it—a lion’s head—was tripped over by the horse of an English historian, searching for the battlefield of Chaeronea.  When the grave was uncovered, no one thought to take photographs; the excavator, Panagiotis Stamatakis, made detailed drawings, but these were lost until recent research discovered them in the archives of the Greek Archaeological Service.  These sketches, reconstituted digitally, have given us an image of the arrangement of the grave—“a phalanx of the dead.”  And Romm, gathering the bits and hints from the classical sources, has restored the troop, not as they were in death, but as they fought in the complex and obstreperous competition for power in fourth-century BC Greece.  “If one of the great cities has done something noble, all the historians record it,” Xenophon wrote.  “But it seems to me that, if some small city has accomplished many noble deeds that it is even more worthy of being made public.”  The Sacred Band, at the great distance of time, retells this story, and it is well worthy of being made public.

The Sacred Band, by James Romm.  Scribner, 2021.