A Band of Lovers

Copyright © 2021 by Graeme O’May

A Band of Lovers

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Print ISBN: 978-1-09837-814-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09837-815-8

Printed in the United States of America

Knowledge is Life with wings

—William Blake (1757 to 1827 CE)

For Mark,

our Epaminondas

Contents

PREFACE

TIMELINE

PROLEPSIS

HELLENICA

THE HUBRIS OF SPARTA

PHALANGES

THEBES ASCENDING

ON PELOPIDAS

HIEROS LOCHOS

VICTORY

ON EPAMINONDAS

LIBERATION

PANDEMONIUM IN THE PELOPONNESE

THE LION IN THE NORTH

EPILOGUE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Figures

Figure I. The Lion of Chaeronea today

Figure II. The Aegean world in the Classical period

Figure III. Central Greece, focused on Boeotia

Figure IV. The Peloponnese

Figure V. Epaminondas saves the life of Pelopidas at the siege of Mantinea, 385 BCE

Figure VI. The battle of Tegyra, 375 BCE

Figure VII. The battle of Leuctra, 371 BCE

Figure VIII. Pelopidas orders the Sacred Band to assault the Spartan line at Leuctra

Figure IX. The battle of Mantinea, 362 BCE

Figure X. The battle of Chaeronea, 338 BCE

Figure XI. The Lion of Chaeronea in the late nineteenth century, prior to its restoration

PREFACE

A WOLF AT THE DOOR

It’s going to happen again.

I always knew when the nightmare would come, although I’ve no idea how I knew. It didn’t come every night, far from it, but it was often enough that I lived in constant terror of the next time. It was always the same, never a deviation from the frightful narrative.

It begins in that nebulous no-man’s-land between wakefulness and sleep. Suddenly acutely aware of my surroundings instead of slipping into slumber, fear quickly takes hold. I know what is to come. But the knowledge is no help—immobilized by an unknown force, I can’t speak or scream or appeal to my mum and dad, asleep in the next room.

The darkness of my bedroom deepens, fear rising to a crescendo.

And then it comes. Red eyes rise at the foot of the bed, red eyes slowly coming closer, gradually revealing the hideous, slabbering visage of a werewolf. Unable to defend myself or even to cry out, teeth tear into flesh, consuming me, feet and ankles and then on to lower legs. Strangely, there was never any pain. Or at least if there was, I don’t remember it.

Thankfully, the nightmare—or more accurately night terror, for such it was—always ended shortly thereafter. The ‘bad thoughts’, the term I used with my parents, recurred, albeit at a frequency decreasing over time, until I was thirty-five years old. Happily, I’ve not experienced a repeat of that nightmare since late 2010, when I realized, or became able to acknowledge, that I’m gay and came out as such to the people around me.

Only comparatively recently, within the last year at the time of writing in March 2021, have I fully understood the meaning of the recurring nightmare. Like most dreams and nightmares, the import lies in the symbolism. Consider the perpetrator, a werewolf. Never any other monster that haunts childhood dreams; never a zombie, or a vampire, or a demon, always a werewolf. And what is a werewolf? It is nothing more or less than a man¹ who has something wrong with him, a defect, a flaw, an unnatural element—a progenitor of shame.

Also consider how the werewolf attacked me. Not with the intent of killing me or maiming me or even of hauling me off to its lair, but specifically to consume me. To put it another way, the werewolf was attempting to erase my existence. In short, the night terror was a subconscious manifestation of my deeply repressed homosexuality. More precisely, it was symbolic of a deep-seated fear that being gay, acknowledging who I really am and living as such, represented an existential threat to my psychological self.

That fear was sufficiently intense that I repressed my sexuality for many long, desperately unhappy years. When I say repressed, I mean repressed so deeply that even I was unaware of my homosexuality until much later in life; when I was thirty-five years old, to be exact. I know many people find that difficult to believe and that is entirely understandable. But the simple fact is that I was not aware of being gay until a grown man on the cusp of middle age.

As I write these lines more than a decade has elapsed since I became aware of being homosexual. During those years, I journeyed along a path leading ultimately to self-acceptance as a gay man, on the way gaining some insight into why I rejected that truth for the first twenty years of my adult life. To my surprise, a passion for ancient history helped propel me towards journey’s end.

Why Write this Book?

I am not a historian, nor do I have any formal schooling in the discipline. My educational background and professional life are both in the life sciences, to be precise in bacteriological and vaccine research and laterally as a medical/scientific writer. A career in science has been very good to me, both materially and in terms of the colorful characters I’ve met along the way.

I was a gangly teenager in secondary school learning the rudiments of science when the death of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, from AIDS²-related pneumonia caused by Pneumocystis jirovecii in November 1991 sparked an interest in infectious disease. I’d discovered Queen’s music only a few months prior and I felt cheated that it’d been taken away from me so soon. In such a way began a lifelong fascination with pathogenic microbes and how we can prevent, or at least ameliorate, their deleterious effects on the body.

So why did I decide to write a book on ancient history? A good question, to be sure, and one that can be broken down into two parts. The first part is why be interested in ancient history? That’s not an easy one to answer, for I’m still working it out. Suffice to say that in the ancient world lies explanations for a number of modern events and for trends that continue to affect us today. There’re also the sometimes startling but always fascinating differences between life in antiquity and that in modern times, and at the same time the myriad remarkable similarities. Instruction is to be found in both. There is much truth in the saying those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The second part of the question is easier to answer: Why write about the Ἱερὸς Λόχος (Sacred Band) of Thebes? The Sacred Band, which existed from 378 to 338 before the common era (BCE), was an elite infantry unit of Thebes, a city-state in Boeotia, central Greece, one of the second rank of ancient Greek city-states. Uniquely (as far as I’m aware, although I’d be happy to be corrected) in the ancient world, the Theban Sacred Band comprised one-hundred fifty couples. Crucially, these were all same-sex (male) couples, what we today would call gay couples.

Yes, you read that right. To be a member of this elite fighting force you were required to be gay. Let that sink in for a moment—required, not merely allowed, to be gay. How strange that sounds to our ears.

It’s important to acknowledge that whether the men of the Sacred Band of Thebes—not to mention the other homosexual couples known from antiquity, such as Alexander III of Macedonia (the Great) and his friend and likely lover Hephaestion Amyntoros—can be labeled gay, homosexual, or bisexual is much debated by scholars in ancient history as well as by those in other fields. Unfortunately, the discussion is of such complexity as to be beyond the scope of A Band of Lovers. If you’d like to read more about homosexuality in antiquity, I recommend the excellent The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World by James N. Davidson. Although arguably simplistic given the intricacy of the issue, throughout A Band of Lovers I describe the men of the Theban Sacred Band as same-sex couples or same-sex lovers.

To (finally!) come to the point, learning of the existence and the historical significance of the Sacred Band helped me to accept my homosexuality. More importantly, that knowledge enabled me to finally, after long unhappy years beneath its stifling pall, reject the shame that so many of us, too many of us, feel over being gay. It is my hope—my dream, really—that by writing this book, by telling others of the story and accomplishments of the Sacred Band, I can help them overcome that shame too.

On Evidence and the Sources

The study of ancient history is often frustrating because of the nature of the evidence we have in our possession. There are two aspects to this issue. First, and perhaps most obviously, the sparsity of the evidence that has survived the millennia separating us from antiquity. The Sacred Band existed for about forty years in the middle of the fourth century BCE; that is, roughly two thousand four hundred years before our time. Unfortunately for those of us interested in it, that period is sandwiched between the comparatively well-documented intellectual and cultural vigor of newly democratic Athens and its conflict with Sparta (known as the Peloponnesian War) in the fifth century BCE and the reign of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (336 to 323 BCE) plus the succeeding Hellenistic age (323 to 31 BCE). For both of these two eras there is available to us a reasonable (for ancient history) amount of information. By contrast, we have very little direct evidence on the Theban Sacred Band.

To overcome the difficulty, I’ve opted to not only set out the evidence we do have on the Sacred Band but also to chronicle the momentous events in which they certainly participated. The time of the Sacred Band saw the end of the power of Sparta, the Peloponnesian city-state that for centuries was, with Athens, one of the two leading polities in ancient Greece. In fact, the Sacred Band was instrumental in Sparta’s fall from power and in Thebes’ rise to brief preeminence, two events intrinsically linked.

Given the above, in A Band of Lovers I relate the story of the transfer of hegemony from Sparta to Thebes and sketch the characters of two of the latter’s leading figures in that period—Pelopidas and Epaminondas, the latter being the former’s successor as commander of the Sacred Band. Because it coincides with the end of the story of the Sacred Band, in the book I also describe, albeit more briefly, Thebes’ subsequent fall from power as well as the contemporaneous rise of Macedonia under its highly effective and innovative king, Philip II.

Compounding the problem of the relative dearth of evidence on the Sacred Band is the ancient authors’ bias. For the period we have a number of sources, among the most important being Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and Xenophon. Of these three sources, Plutarch and Diodorus wrote their works several centuries after the events described therein and so relied on earlier material, obviously introducing the possibility of bias. Additionally, much of the material they relied on has been lost between their time and ours, compounding the problem.

By contrast, Xenophon (lived ca. 430 to 354 BCE) lived at the time of the Sacred Band, and so might be expected to be a more reliable source for their history. Xenophon is perhaps most famous for his participation in the revolt of Cyrus the Younger against the Persian King Artaxerxes II in 401 BCE. More specifically, Xenophon led the anabasis (‘march up-country’) to the Black Sea coast of the surviving Greek mercenaries after Cyrus’ defeat at the battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia. But although an Athenian citizen by birth, Xenophon was very much a supporter of Sparta and its oligarchic system of government, and indeed was a close friend of one of its more famous and active kings. That Spartan king had his own biases, as will become clear, some of which Xenophon adopted himself, notably a bias against all things Theban. For this reason, the Hellenica, Xenophon’s history of the first half of the fourth century BCE, has many oversights, not to mention outrageous and deliberate omissions, particularly with regard to the city of Thebes and its politicians and generals.

A Few Useful Notes

Before you go on, there follow a few things you may find useful when reading A Band of Lovers. First, simply because they are more familiar to us, in the book I use the Latinized spelling of ancient Greek words and names in place of the original Greek. Also, any such words are italicized in the text. Thus, perioeci instead of perioikoi, and spartiates rather than homoioi.

Second, in compliance with historiographic convention and for a hopefully obvious reason, in A Band of Lovers I cite dates BCE ‘before the common era’ rather than BC ‘before Christ.’ Third, and again according to historiographic practice, ‘King’ with an uppercase initial letter always refers to the Great King of Persia; a lowercase initial letter indicates a king of some other state. Thus, King Artaxerxes II (of the Persian Empire) but king Agesilaus II (of Sparta).

Fourth, a few chapters in A Band of Lovers begin with short narratives, indicated by italics. These, as well as the narrative within the Prolepsis, are fictional, albeit based on documented events or in one instance a Boeotian legend. For example, the narrative involving Agesilaus in The Hubris of Sparta is based on the ephors’ message to that king while he was in Asia Minor in 395 BCE, recalling him home to Greece to deal with the troublesome Thebans and their growing circle of allies.

Fifth and finally, because the ancient world can feel like an alien place, as it did (and sometimes still does) to me, I include three aids to understanding for readers. Immediately after this preface is a timeline of the major events discussed in A Band of Lovers. At the end of the book, you’ll find a glossary of terms that are probably unfamiliar to you (as they were to me when I first became interested in Greece in antiquity) and a dramatis personae you can refer to when reading. The book concludes with a bibliography comprising the works referred to in its writing.

Acknowledgements

Given unlimited space I’d make explicit my gratitude to the many friends and family members who’ve helped me on my journey to self-acceptance and/or with writing A Band of Lovers. But space is not unlimited, alas, so I ask them to please accept this blanket thank-you instead.

The above notwithstanding, I’d like to single out a few of those who’ve made particularly significant contributions to my journey. First and most important, my second wife, Kimberley O’May, for her unwavering support over the past fourteen years. Kim, I couldn't have done it without you; we’ll never be lonely. Also, my stepchildren, Paul and Julia Mendez, who brought into my life joy that I never expected to experience. I love you both beyond words and I’m so very proud of the outstanding individuals you’ve grown to become. Being part of that process has been the privilege of my life. I shall always be there for you.

To my Dad and Mum, Duncan and Anne O’May, I say this: Without your influence, this book could not have been written, in every possible respect. I would be content with being half as good a stepparent to Paul and Julia as you were parents to me and to my sister.

Moving from family to friends, I’d like to thank my good friend Joshua Taylor for his support and his monumental patience while I was struggling with coming out, and for always being an indefatigable warrior for truth. The latter an attribute not to be discarded lightly.

Another close friend, Eric Maul, showed me the importance of self-discipline in the creative process and helped me understand the artistic mind. My English teacher in secondary school, Jacqui Dunlop, has for three decades been an indispensable source of support and advice on use of the English language.

I’d also like to thank Birthé Shirtliff, Devon Allison, and Naomi Wesley, who have been indispensable sources of strength for me in the past few years, and I know will continue to be in future. David Dhawan, a friend since our first day at Edinburgh University together, I want to thank for his constant support and honest conversation—both of which have been priceless to me for decades now.

As well as supportive family and friends, I was fortunate in having professional guides on my journey to accepting myself as a gay man. As therapists, Dorothy Vidra, now retired, and subsequently Kathleen Grau provided invaluable guidance and support along the path, for which I am very grateful. Theirs is a truly noble calling.

Finally, a big thank you to all those who read and provided comments on and critiques of the various drafts of A Band of Lovers, for your input was invaluable for its completion. That said, any omissions or errors in the book are my responsibility, and mine alone.

I hope you enjoy A Band of Lovers as much or more as I enjoyed its writing, and more importantly that, like me, you take something positive from the story of the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Let’s begin that story at its end.

1 In my case. Of course, werewolves can be of any gender or of none.

2 Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

TIMELINE

Note that all dates are BCE. Many dates are approximate and can vary by one or two years in either direction. References to the Sacred Band are in bold typeface.

PROLEPSIS

THE ONLY ONES HE EVER FEARED

A long, hot, dusty day of battle, and Philip, king of the Macedonians, casts his helmet aside and with the one eye remaining to him gazes across the charnel landscape stretching into the distance. Evening’s shadow creeps towards and gradually envelops the victorious king. Philip stands motionless, but not thoughtless, outside the town of Chaeronea in Boeotia, a region of central Greece which had been autonomous until the events of that fateful day in 338 BCE.

One would think that after success in campaigns against so many enemies, Philip would be accustomed to the pungent miasma of shit, blood, and despair that permeates a battlefield. But he has not yet grown used to the horror, and he never really will. And especially not after fighting this enemy. To Philip it had felt like killing a part of himself from long ago, when he was an untried youth not expected to ascend the throne in Pella.

Ancient Macedonia lies immediately north of the southeast-pointing peninsula that comprises mainland Greece. Traveling south from Macedonia, the major regions of Greece are encountered in the order Thessaly, Boeotia (slightly to the west), and Attica (with its capital, Athens). To the southwest of Attica across the narrow land bridge of the Isthmus of Corinth lies the Peloponnese, home of the Spartans and their enslaved workers, the Messenians, as well as the Argives, the Arcadians, and the Eleians, traditional guardians of Olympia, the location of the famous quadrennial Olympic Games.

The boy will, with a little guidance, make a great king, is Philip’s reaction to the approach of his son and heir, Alexander³. Surrounded as always by a corps of loyal, able friends, the prince hails his victorious father. In response, Philip beckons his son to follow as he tours the battlefield to congratulate the men and share in their celebrations.

To the young prince’s surprise, though, exposure to the men’s victory-elation does nothing to alleviate his father’s malaise. Alexander points out to the king that his army—the courageous, faithful men from the mountainous north and west of Macedonia and those hailing from its broad southern plains alike—have suffered rather few casualties. In fact, the army is largely intact and will in short order be ready for Philip’s next great enterprise: the invasion of the Persian Empire, that mighty realm to the east of the Greek world.

The official aim of the king’s ambitious eastern campaign, preparations for which were by then well underway, was to exact retribution for the destruction of Athens, including its temples, by the Persians under King Xerxes during the Greco–Persian War almost 150 years earlier. The irony was, of course, that Macedonia had fought on the side of the Persians in that war, as had Thebes and the majority of the other Greek city-states.

In reality, Philip was an ambitious, aggressive man in command of the most effective military machine the world had yet seen, a machine he rapidly created from next to nothing. Such a combination compels action. Now that he’d subjugated the fractious Greeks to the south and the fierce, warlike tribes on Macedonia’s northern and eastern borders, the Persian Empire was the only real target remaining worthy of a man of Philip’s ability and vision.

For almost his entire adult life Philip had dreamt of invading the powerful, fabulously rich empire to the east. Now that the threat posed by the Sacred Band and its legendary commanders had been removed, the time for the great eastern adventure was at hand.

But not even the prospect of fulfilling that cherished dream brings joy to the king of Macedonia. To his son and heir Philip appears distracted, even distant. Alexander, although accustomed to his father’s moods, is unsure what to make of this strange malaise.

Philip, despite several short detours to greet friends and favored senior officers, heads always in the same general direction, seemingly drawn towards a particular spot on the landscape.

Following his father’s gaze, Alexander beholds in the middle distance a mound of bodies. Piled high one atop another, they lie quite still, blood and dirt obscuring the sheen of their bronze armor and weapons despite the early evening sun. Having engaged them in combat that day, Alexander recognizes the bodies of the feared Hieros Lochos (Sacred Band) of Thebes, that great city’s elite infantry regiment. In life those men were regarded by all Greeks as invincible in battle. And for good reason, for had they not vanquished the vaunted Spartans at Leuctra thirty-three years earlier and at Mantinea a decade later? The cause of his father’s melancholy now dawns on the Macedonian prince—as a young man, Philip lived in Thebes for several years as a guest, or as a hostage, depending on one’s point of view.

While residing in Thebes from about 368 to 365 BCE, the teenage Philip, a prince of Macedon but not expected to ascend the throne, lived with the leading politician and general Pammenes, later to become commander of the Sacred Band. This privileged position afforded Philip many opportunities to learn from the leading citizens of democratic Thebes during its hegemony over much of Greece. And learn much of politics, diplomacy, and warfare the young man did.

Two figures were Philip’s most important teachers during his sojourn in Thebes. From the philosopher-general Epaminondas the young prince learned, among other things, the subtle arts of politics and the principles of diplomacy and of warfare. Epaminondas taught Philip that the judicious application of diplomacy could be as effective, and in some situations more effective, than war or the threat thereof. It was a lesson that Philip would put to good use when he set out to subjugate the Greek world after becoming king of Macedonia as a result of his brother’s untimely death in 356 BCE.

Epaminondas certainly also passed on to the eager Macedonian prince his extensive knowledge of military strategy. After all, it was Epaminondas who devised the novel sledgehammer-and-echelon tactic used by the Thebans at the battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, when they crushed the feared military of Sparta. That great, and to the majority of Greeks unexpected, victory ended the decades-long Spartan hegemony, established in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE. The victory of Thebes at Leuctra led directly to establishment of the Theban hegemony.

The former Theban hegemony, that is. The era of Macedonian domination of all Greece dawned that day at Chaeronea, for it was then that the Greek city-states permanently lost their cherished liberty.

The thought of Pelopidas, his other Theban mentor, induces painful regret in Philip, as he passes a Macedonian busily looting a Theban body. Philip smiles and nods in approval, gestures that the man will recall in years to come when telling of his encounter with the Macedonian king. Pelopidas, Epaminondas’ friend and colleague, had been far more than a teacher to Philip, he had been a close friend—and a lover.

Pelopidas, during Philip’s sojourn in Thebes, was a boeotarch (general) of the Boeotian League, a loose confederation of cities headed by Thebes. He was also the second commander of the Sacred Band. In fact, after assuming that command upon the death of his predecessor, Pelopidas changed the way the Sacred Band was employed. Rather than dispersed among the front ranks of the phalanx, Pelopidas after the victory at Tegyra in 375 BCE used the Sacred Band as one unit, as an elite strike force.

On the battlefield, the Sacred Band was tasked with directly assailing the enemy commander and his bodyguard, with the