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 disp...