The Battle of Tegyra in 375 B.C. proved that the legendary Spartan army could be defeated.
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.
The most fearsome military force of its day had been defeated by the Sacred Band of Thebes, a shock troop of 150 gay couples.
As Pride Month begins, more than a decade after the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” allowed sexual minorities to serve openly in the U.S. military, an outspoken LGBTQ+ presence in the armed forces remains controversial. Last Pride season, congressional Republicans sought to block military spending on Pride celebrations and have rainbow flags removed from the offices of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the amendments were targeted at eliminating “radical programs that are forced on our troops at the expense of readiness.”
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Yet one of history’s fiercest combat units intentionally recruited only gay soldiers.
The ancient Greek city-state of Thebes had been under Spartan occupation for three years when a group of Theban exiles stormed the citadel in 379 B.C. and retook the city. Still, the Thebans knew they would need a revolutionary strategy to keep the Spartans out for good.
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.
Classical Greece is often depicted as embracing male hom*osexuality, but the reality is more complicated. Romantic relationships between adult men and teenage boys were widely accepted as a form of social mentorship in which the older partner guided the younger through his transition to manhood. Continuing the relationship after the younger partner’s beard grew in, however, was taboo, and even men who took young male lovers were expected to marry women and father children.
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Thebes was one of the few city-states to embrace lifelong same-sex partnerships. Athenian historian Xenophon wrote that there, male couples could live “yoked together,” a phrase typically reserved for marriage.
For centuries, male couples pledged faithfulness to each other at the city’s shrine to Iolaus, nephew and young lover of the hero Heracles. The setting would have reminded everyone present of the link between hom*osexuality and heroism.
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.
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In Plato’s “Symposium,” written around the time Gorgidas was assembling his new military unit, the character Phaedrus reflects on what good soldiers male couples would make:
“Even just a few such men, fighting side by side, could conquer practically the entire human race. For surely the last person a lover could bear to see him abandoning his post or surrendering his weapons would be his boyfriend — he would sooner die many times over!”
Gorgidas recruited 150 couples skilled in martial combat for his elite corps. This Sacred Band, 300 strong, became Greece’s first professional standing army, housed and fed by the city.
They first saw action in the spring of 378 B.C., when Sparta tried to seize the farmlands around Thebes. Seeing the Spartan army coming like “a solid mass of bronze and crimson,” Xenophon wrote, the Thebans and their Athenian allies dramatically assumed an at-ease pose to show they didn’t consider the Spartans a threat. This display of bravado scared off the Spartans.
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The Battle of Tegyra proved the Sacred Band could beat the Spartans in open combat, but the decisive clash didn’t come until 371 B.C. on the plain of Leuctra. Again, Sparta had more soldiers, but the Theban general Epaminondas adopted an unconventional strategy.
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.
The Thebans slashed into Sparta’s unprepared right wing, killing its generals. Rudderless, Sparta’s allies in the center and left of the line fell back. When the dust cleared, 1,000 Spartan troops lay slain, among them King Cleombrotus, the first Spartan ruler to die in battle since Leonidas at Thermopylae more than 100 years earlier.
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The Battle of Leuctra marked a turning point in Greek history. After suffering such heavy losses of men and reputation, Sparta’s power was permanently diminished. It lost its iron grip on its allies and became a political backwater.
For a generation after Leuctra, Thebes was the dominant military force in Greece — an era historian James Romm calls “the age of the Sacred Band.” In the end, it took none other than Alexander the Great to bring it to heel.
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.
The battle pitted the Sacred Band against Philip’s most seasoned generals, commanded by 18-year-old Alexander. The Greeks’ spears proved to be no match for the Macedonians’ long battle pikes and Alexander’s bold tactics. Cut off from its allies, the band stood its ground until it was slaughtered to a man.
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According to Louis Crompton, queer studies pioneer and author of “hom*osexuality and Civilization,” the fate of the Sacred Band “was in the end the fate of Greece itself.” After Chaeronea, Greek resistance to Philip crumbled, and Alexander ultimately razed Thebes to the ground.
In recent years, some scholars have argued that the Sacred Band was merely a metaphor for military camaraderie, but most historians agree this brotherhood of 150 couples really did exist.
Excavation of a mass grave on the battlefield at Chaeronea uncovered the bodies of 254 soldiers believed to be the band’s war dead. Amid the broken bones and fractured skulls, some pairs of skeletons lay linked arm in arm, a tribute to a love that outlasted death.
Ainsley Hawthorn, PhD, is a cultural historian, author and speaker based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
