From classicist James Romm comes a “striking…fascinating”
(Booklist) deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom
leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes—and
the saga of the greatest military corps of the time, the Theban
Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers. The story
of the Sacred Band, an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of
lovers, highlights a chaotic era of ancient Greek history, four
decades marked by battles, ideological disputes, and the rise of
vicious strongmen. At stake was freedom, democracy, and the fate of
Thebes, at this time the leading power of the Greek world. The tale
begins in 379 BC, with a group of Theban patriots sneaking into
occupied Thebes. Disguised in women’s clothing, they cut down the
agents of Sparta, the state that had cowed much of Greece with its
military might. To counter the Spartans, this group of patriots
would form the Sacred Band, a corps whose history plays out against
a backdrop of Theban democracy, of desperate power struggles
between leading city-states, and the new prominence of eros, sexual
love, in Greek public life. After four decades without a defeat,
the Sacred Band was annihilated by the forces of Philip II of
Macedon and his son Alexander in the Battle of
Chaeronea—extinguishing Greek liberty for two thousand years.
Buried on the battlefield where they fell, they were rediscovered
in 1880—some skeletons still in pairs, with arms linked together.
From violent combat in city streets to massive clashes on open
ground, from ruthless tyrants to bold women who held their era in
thrall, The Sacred Band recounts “in fluent, accessible prose”
(The Wall Street Journal) the twists and turns of a crucial
historical moment: the end of the treasured freedom of ancient
Greece.
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