The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers and the Last Days of Greek Freedom

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 d