The Legend of the Sacred Band

º

David Leitao

This chapter aims to take a fresh look at the tradition of the Theban Sa- cred Band, a fourth-century-b.c.e. military unit that legend suggests was

composed entirely of lovers and their beloveds. Scholars have tended to take our sources for this tradition at face value,1 but if we read these texts with greater sensitivity to their rhetorical strategies, we will discover that the historicity of an erotic Sacred Band rests on the most precarious of founda- tions. But my goal in problematizing the truthfulness of this tradition is not ultimately to offer decisive proof that Thebes never had an erotically con- stituted fighting force (although I believe they probably did not), but rather to redirect our attention to the discursive conditions that made it possible for an erotic Sacred Band, based on however small a kernel of historical truth, to take its first steps onto the scene of history.

 

 

A Band of Lovers and Beloveds

 

The Sacred Band (iJero;~ lovco~ in Greek) 2  is described as an elite Theban military force of three hundred men that remained undefeated for about forty years in the middle of the fourth century b.c.e. The band was credited with victories over much larger Spartan forces at Tegyra in 375 and again at Leuctra in 371 and was eventually annihilated by the forces of Philip at

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Chaeronea in 338.3 A few scholars have detected references to the Sacred Band that fall outside this period. Some point to a passage in Diodorus that describes a special Theban force of three hundred composed of “charioteers and footmen” [hJnivocoi kai; parabavtai] 4 that fought at the front of the line at the Battle of Delium in 424: these were probably originally pairs of men who fought from chariots in the Homeric fashion, although in 424 they were clearly fighting as hoplites.5 Others have pointed to a third-century epigram by Phaedimus in which Apollo of Schoenus (a village near Thebes) is asked to “direct an arrow of Eros at these youths [hjivqeoi] in order that they de- fend their fatherland, emboldened by the friendship of young men [filov- tati kouvrwn]” (Anth. Pal. 13.22.4– 6).6 Neither passage, however, mentions the Sacred Band by name, and the poem by Phaedimus may be alluding to the tradition of an earlier Sacred Band or even be invoking a more generic topos about the role of eros in binding a fighting force together (more in “Utopian Philosophy” below).

Our primary focus in this chapter is the tradition that the Sacred Band was composed of pairs of lovers and their beloveds, and it will be useful, before we begin to examine the sources for this tradition, to consider just what this means. It surely does not mean simply that pederastic affairs were permitted to intrude on army life at Thebes, as such intrusions were appar- ently not uncommon in Greek armies. We hear, for example, of Greek sol- diers on campaign quarreling over paidika or pursuing boys who happened to be in camp or in a village nearby.7 Occasionally paidika are described as being present during battle itself, but when our sources are specific about what they are doing there it often turns out that they are not actively en- gaged in fighting. Xenophon’s account of the Spartan general Anaxibius and his beloved at Cremaste in 389 b.c.e. is illustrative. Anaxibius and twelve Spartan harmosts are said to have “died fighting” [macovmeno~ ajpoqnhvÊskei and macovmenoi sunapevqanon, respectively], whereas Anaxibius’s beloved, whose fate is described between that of Anaxibius and the harmosts, is said merely to have “remained by [Anaxibius’s] side” [aujtw`/ parevmeine] (Hell. 4.8.39). Xenophon does not say that the boy was a regular in the army,8 nor would we expect him to be: boys who were still young enough to be erome- noi were generally not old enough to be part of the muster.9 The boy’s pres- ence in some such cases may perhaps be explained by a desire on his part to witness the battle.10 So while there are a number of texts that mention the presence of paidika on campaign, they point to nothing more than a spo- radic and ad hoc practice and suggest that in many cases, at least, the youth was present not as a regular hoplite, but for other reasons.11 There was also another way in which the institution of pederasty manifested itself in the

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army, and that was through the presence of former lovers and beloveds in the same unit. This was doubtless the case of Alcibiades and Socrates on campaign at Potidaea (432) and later Delium (424), and Plato hints at the salutary effect the presence of each had on the other.12 But our sources for the Sacred Band describe a phenomenon quite different from these ordi- nary pederastic intrusions on army life: (1) the Theban Sacred Band seems to have been composed exclusively of pairs of lovers and beloveds,13 and

(2) these pairs were presumably involved in an active and ongoing rela- tionship of an intense emotional, if not sexual, nature.14 A Sacred Band so constituted would have been radical indeed.

Even for Thebes. Classical Thebes was known for its local pederastic customs. Plutarch tells us that lovers presented their beloveds with suits of armor when the latter were inscribed on the citizen rolls, and Aristotle re- cords that lovers and beloveds swore oaths at the tomb of Iolaus.15 But while these ethnographic details are not inconsistent with the existence of an erotically constituted military band, neither do they entail such an institu- tion. The presentation of armor obviously marked the beloved’s passage from boyhood to manhood and thus, quite likely, the end of the pederastic tie, as did a similar custom reported for classical Crete; the oath reported by Aristotle, possibly a citizenship oath, may have taken place on the same oc- casion.16 Indeed, Theban gift giving and oath swearing were perfectly com- patible with the pederastic norms of other Greek cities, especially Sparta and the cities of Crete, where pederastic practices were more thoroughly in- stitutionalized. An army of lovers and beloveds would have been a differ- ent story.

 

 

The Sources for the Sacred Band

 

The texts that explicitly mention an erotic Sacred Band are surprisingly few and late and are all of questionable historical value. Plutarch himself, who is the author of our fullest account of the origin and exploits of the Sacred Band, suggests that of those writers who wrote about the Sacred Band, only a minority (e[nioi, “some”; Pel. 18.2) claimed that it was erotically consti- tuted. And his view is to some extent reflected in the texts that survive: there are eleven texts by nine different authors that refer explicitly to a Theban Sacred Band,17 and six mention an erotic composition. Moreover, there is a clear genre distinction between those texts that mention an erotic Sacred Band and those that mention a nonerotic battalion. The latter all derive from a pro-Boeotian historiographical tradition that originated in the second half

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of the fourth century b.c.e. Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas (except chapters 18– 19, see more in this section below) draws on Callisthenes, and the refer- ence at Life of Alexander 9.2 may as well; Diodorus is based for the most part on Ephorus, but many scholars have argued that the passage in which Diodorus mentions the Sacred Band by name (the so-called elegy of Pelopi- das) comes directly from Callisthenes; Cornelius Nepos is dependent on ei- ther Callisthenes or Ephorus; and Dinarchus mentions the Sacred Band in a speech delivered in 323, very likely under the influence of Callisthenes’ Hellenica or Ephorus’s Historia, both of which had been published only a few years before.18 All five sources for the nonerotic tradition, then, can be traced back to the pro-Boeotian histories of Callisthenes and Ephorus.

The six texts that mention an erotic Sacred Band —Hieronymus of Rhodes, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch (Pel. 18–19), Polyaenus, Maximus of Tyre, and Athenaeus — are what we might call “moralistic” texts, and most of these seem to draw on a tradition of writing about eros that goes back to the early fourth century. We may start with chapters 18 and 19 of Plutarch’s Pelopidas, our most extensive source for the Sacred Band. Although Plu- tarch’s main source for the Life of Pelopidas as a whole seems to be Callisthe- nes, it has been shown that his digression on the Sacred Band (chaps. 18– 19), introduced ominously by “as they say” [w{~ fasi], actually derives from a work on eros.19 The evidence is worth considering briefly. Two of the an- ecdotes in the digression turn up also in Plutarch’s Amatorius.20 Another an- ecdote— this one about the bravery of a Theban lover on the battlefield— is told of a Cretan in Aelian’s De Natura Animalium (4.1), in a passage in which Aelian discusses the erotic protocols of partridges and Cretans. Fi- nally, Plutarch attempts to explain the sacredness of the Sacred Band by re- ferring to Plato’s designation of the lover as an entheos philos, “divinely in- spired friend.” This exact phrase turns up in the Phaedrus (255b), where Plato claims that neither relatives nor friends can offer the true friendship that a “divinely inspired friend” can. But the term entheos also turns up twice in the speech of Phaedrus in the Symposium (179a, 180b), the first of these in the context of proposing to create a city or army out of pairs of lovers and their beloveds. This is almost certainly the Platonic passage Plutarch here has in mind, and it is not the only probable allusion to Plato’s Symposium in this digression.21 Plutarch’s knowledge of the erotic tradition of the Sacred Band, then, appears not to derive from local Boeotian historians, as some have argued, or even from Callisthenes or Ephorus, but from a tradition of writing about eros that goes all the way back to Plato.22

The other five texts that describe an erotic Sacred Band exhibit similar generic affiliations. The eighteenth dissertatio of Maximus of Tyre is a defense

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of Socrates’ vision of chaste pederastic love. Hieronymus of Rhodes, who in fragment 34 describes the historical role played by pederastic couples in re- sisting tyranny, derives his examples, according to Wehrli, from an earlier work on eros.23 This certainly is the origin of Athenaeus 561c–562a, which is an extended discussion of the role of Eros as promoter of civic and military cohesion. The twenty-second oration of Dio Chrysostom is a discussion of how the philosopher would manage the state, and the philosophical Epam- inondas is cited for stationing lovers beside beloveds “in order that they . . . be witnesses of each other’s bravery and cowardice” (22.2). The effects of shame on the warrior’s comportment was a theme taken up already by Plato in the Symposium, and there are hints here also of the Republic written by the Stoic Zeno, who appears to have advocated binding citizens to each other through bonds of philia created by eros (more in “Utopian Philosophy” be- low). Polyaenus, finally, the second-century-c.e. strategical writer, might seem to be the exception, but as we shall see shortly, his source for the Sa- cred Band is probably ultimately a utopian philosophical text.

But it is not only the erotic element of the tradition that we ought to view with caution: there is evidence that even the historiographical texts, which mention a nonerotic Sacred Band, have greatly exaggerated the role played by the Sacred Band in the key battles of Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea. The Battle of Tegyra (375 b.c.e.), for instance, the first great victory of the new Theban army over a much larger Spartan adversary, is considerably embel- lished by Callisthenes. Ephorus, whose account is preserved by Diodorus, describes a victory of five hundred Theban picked troops (ejpivlektoi a[n- dre~) over twice as many Spartans (Diod. 15.37.1). In Callisthenes’ account, as it is preserved by Plutarch, the Thebans overcome odds in excess of four to one: three hundred members of the Sacred Band and a few cavalry de- feat an enemy that “far exceeded them in number” [uJperbavllonta~ plhv- qei], a number we know Callisthenes put at fourteen hundred Spartans.24 And credit for the victory belongs to Pelopidas and his Sacred Band alone. Ephorus’s account differs from Callisthenes’ in four significant respects. First, the picked men are not referred to as the Sacred Band. Second, the number of these picked troops is five hundred, not three hundred, the con- ventional number given in most of the sources that mention the Sacred Band by name. Third, the battle is not identified geographically with the village of Tegyra, but with Orchomenus, the larger city nearby, where the de- feated Spartan army was based. Fourth, Pelopidas is not even mentioned, let alone credited with the victory.25 The conclusion is obvious: Callisthe- nes’ version exaggerates the magnitude of the victory in the interest of The- ban panegyric and exaggerates, if not invents, the role of Pelopidas and the

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Sacred Band.26 We need not doubt that a special corps of picked troops fought for the Thebans at Tegyra: many Greek armies in the fifth and fourth centuries employed crack forces. But there is reason to wonder whether it was the Sacred Band under the leadership of Pelopidas.

Accounts of the Battle of Leuctra also show signs of tinkering. There are four major accounts of the battle—Callisthenes, Ephorus, Xenophon, and Pausanias—but only one attributes a role to Pelopidas and mentions the Sa- cred Band by name, and once again that is Callisthenes.27 Ephorus, as epit- omized in Diodorus, credits the entire success at Leuctra to Epaminondas’s “oblique phalanx formation” and the resulting engagement of a single wing, which he had manned by “picking out the best men from the whole army” [ejklexavmeno~... ejx aJpavsh~ th`~ dunavmew~ tou;~ ajrivstou~] (15.55.2). Is this a reference to the Sacred Band? Possibly. And yet, once again, the Sacred Band is not mentioned by name; no specific number of “picked troops” is given; they appear to be “picked” for this specific occasion; and they have nothing to do with Pelopidas. Xenophon’s silence on the presence of the Sacred Band (and on the tactical innovations Ephorus and others attributed to Epaminondas) is more compelling still: some scholars have cried foul, alleging that Xenophon was anti-Theban and sought any opportunity to diminish the accomplishments of the Theban hegemony, but recently Vic- tor Hanson has demonstrated, decisively in my mind, that Xenophon’s ac- count is accurate and sensitive to the tactical realities of fourth-century war- fare, and that the accounts of Ephorus and Callisthenes, two men whose grasp of military affairs was ridiculed in antiquity, aimed to embellish the achievements of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, respectively.28 It seems clear that Pelopidas and the Sacred Band do not appear in the accounts of Xen- ophon and Pausanias for the same reason that they are absent from the fourth-century account of Ephorus: the Sacred Band was not thought to have played any (special) role at Leuctra.

Evidence for the role of the Sacred Band at the Battle of Chaeronea is perhaps the most tenuous of all, as the tradition is recorded by Plutarch alone, at Pelopidas 18.5 and at Alexander 9.2, both notices introduced by a qualifying “it is said” [levgetai]. A comparison between the account of Plu- tarch and that of Diodorus, our fullest source for the battle, is revealing. Both accounts describe a battle that pitted Philip against Athenians on the right side of the Macedonian line, and Alexander against Thebans on the left side of the line. And both credit the young Alexander with a decisive move, Diodorus claiming that he was the first to break the continuity of the en- emy line (16.86.3), Plutarch that he was the first to break the ranks of the Sacred Band (Alex. 9.2). It is tempting to see this as an attempt by Plutarch’s

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ultimate (pro-Alexandrian) source to embellish this youthful victory of Al- exander’s by characterizing it as a victory over not just any Thebans, but the most impressive fighting force Thebes was ever known to have fielded. While Plutarch, himself a native of Chaeronea, would doubtless have had access to local sources for the battle of 338, he seems clearly to draw here, once again, on fourth-century sources. And Callisthenes of Olynthus, whom Plu- tarch cites by name at Alexander 27.4, 33.1, and 33.10 and at Pelopidas 17.2, who seems unique in his presentation simultaneously of a pro-Theban and pro-Alexandrian perspective, and who, as we have seen already, is intimately associated with the early tradition of the Sacred Band, is a good candi- date.29 Interestingly, it is on the basis of these brief notices in Plutarch on the presence of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea that a number of modern scholars have supposed that the Lion Monument discovered at Chaeronea at the beginning of the twentieth century marks the burial site of the Sacred Band and that the skeletons of 254 men found buried within the enclosure of the monument are their bodies.30 But the inference seems hardly justi- fied when Plutarch, our only source for the presence of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea and himself a native of the town, does not mention the monu- ment, and Pausanias, who saw it and presumably reports local tradition, states only that it marks the burial site of “the Thebans who died in the struggle against Philip.” 31

Plutarch is our most important conduit for the tradition of the Sacred Band, and yet even he seems to hesitate to vouch for the historicity of a specifically erotic band. In his Amatorius, for example, where he lists several examples in which eros promotes military valor, he fails to mention the Sa- cred Band by name or even, it seems, allude to it. He does mention four other examples of military eros at Thebes: (1) the practice whereby Theban lovers presented suits of armor to their beloveds when the latter were in- scribed onto the citizen rolls, (2) the customary oaths sworn by Theban lovers and their beloveds at the tomb of Iolaus, (3) Epaminondas’s two be- loveds and his death on the battlefield near one of them, and (4) the The- ban Pammenes’ playful criticism of Homer for failing to station lovers be- side beloveds and Pammenes’ subsequent change in the order of the battle line (h[llaxe de; kai; metevqhke tavxin tw`n oJplitw`n). All four traditions are perfectly consistent with the erotic tradition of the Sacred Band, and yet none necessarily entails the existence of a Sacred Band composed exclu- sively of lovers and beloveds. The Pammenes anecdote comes closest, but we cannot be sure that Pammenes’ new formation was erotic (the empha- sis in Plutarch’s three versions of the anecdote is always the humorous criti- cism of Homer), and even if it was, there is no indication that the change

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was anything more than an ad hoc formation for a particular occasion. Moreover, when Plutarch mentions the Pammenes anecdote at Quaestiones Conviviales 618cd, he credits Epaminondas 32 with the actual change in battle formation (whatever it was) and then proceeds to use it to make a playful argument about banquet seating. That Plutarch in the Amatorius does not mention the name of Thebes’s erotic army or its early leaders Gorgidas and Pelopidas is a bit puzzling and makes us suspect that even for Plutarch the legend of the Sacred Band was most at home in the panegyric tradition sur- rounding Pelopidas.

And yet even when it comes time to present his panegyric history in the Life of Pelopidas, Plutarch finds it necessary to distance himself from the erotic tradition of the Sacred Band by recourse to an unusual number of qualifiers: 33 w{~ fasi (“as they say”; 8.1) introduces the entire digression on the Sacred Band, e[nioi dev fasin (“some say”; 18.1) introduces the minor-                                ity tradition that it was erotically constituted, levgetai (“it is said”; 18.4) in- troduces an erotic version of the myth of Iolaus and Heracles, eijkov~ (“it is probable”;18.4) introduces his dubious Platonic etymology of the name of the Sacred Band, and levgetai (“it is said”;18.5) introduces the claim that the Sacred Band remained undefeated until Chaeronea and the anecdote about Philip on the battlefield. Indeed, such qualifiers seem almost to be part of the tradition itself. Already Dinarchus, our earliest reference to the Sacred Band (and a nonerotic one), presents the legend of the Sacred Band as “stories” [logoi] told by his “elders” [presbuteroi] and further qualifies his reference to Pelopidas’s leadership of the band with “as they say” [w{~ fasin] (1.72–73). Likewise, Dio Chrysostom introduces his mention of an erotic Sacred Band with levgetai (22.2). Plutarch, for his part, seems willing to re- port the traditions associated with the Sacred Band in his moralizing biog- raphy of Pelopidas but simultaneously maintains his distance from them, especially the tradition about its erotic composition.

We have noticed two interesting things about the texts that refer explic- itly to a Theban Sacred Band. First, the role of the band at Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea seems to have been picked up in just one strand of Greek historical writing about the Theban hegemony, a strand that seems to go back to Callisthenes of Olynthus. It is pointless to speculate about why Cal- listhenes might have insisted on a special role for the Sacred Band, when the accounts of Xenophon, Ephorus, and Pausanias were silent: it might have been a desire, as Fuscagni and Sordi have argued, to fashion Pelopidas into a Greek prototype for Philip II, whose panhellenic foreign policy to some extent followed in the footsteps of Pelopidas and Epaminondas.34 It seems that legends frequently grew up about special military bands: some-

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times nonexistent bands were invented, as Thucydides alleges happened in the case of Sparta’s so-called Pitanate lochos (1.20.3),35 and sometimes the activities of actual bands were embellished. Callisthenes’ account of the Sacred Band was, at the very least, an embellished account. Second, we noticed that among those sources that do mention a Theban Sacred Band, it is only in what we might call the more moralistic texts —Hieronymus of Rhodes, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch (Pel. 18–19), Polyaenus, Maximus of Tyre, and Athenaeus — that we hear of the band’s erotic composition. The silence of historiography and related genres cannot be explained in terms of genre incompatibility. The historians routinely describe the composition of Greek armies where the composition is noteworthy and do not eschew the erotic when this plays a significant role in historical developments: Xen- ophon in the Hellenica, to take an example we have already discussed, is not at all reticent about mentioning the presence of paidika in army life and on the battlefield.36 The failure of the erotic Sacred Band to make it into the historical tradition leads one to suspect that it was not considered “histori- cal” by writers who were most concerned with that sort of “truth”.

 

 

Plato and Xenophon

 

With these doubts about the later tradition of the Sacred Band in mind, let us turn now to two important earlier texts in which some scholars have de- tected allusions to an erotic Sacred Band: the Symposia of Plato and Xeno- phon. Plato’s Phaedrus caps his discussion of the civic benefits of eros with what must have struck his auditors as a novel proposal: “If it could be con- trived that a city or an army be formed of lovers and beloveds, there is no way that men could establish their city on a better footing than they would by avoiding all disgrace and by striving to outdo each other in honor. Why such men fighting together, even if few in number, would defeat practically the whole world” (Pl. Symp. 178e–179a). Xenophon’s Socrates, as if reply- ing to Plato’s Phaedrus, argues that sexual relationships between men and boys do not provide a context for the performance of brave deeds: “And yet Pausanias, lover of the poet Agathon, has said, in defending those who wal- low in lack of self-control [akrasia], that an army composed of lovers and beloveds would be especially strong. For he said he thought that these men would be especially ashamed to abandon one another, a remarkable thing to say, that men accustomed to ignore criticism and to behave shamelessly [ajnaiscuntei`n] toward each other [sc. sexually] would be ashamed [aijscu- nou`ntai] to commit a shameful act [aijscrovn ti] [sc. in battle]. And he used

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to bring forth as evidence the fact that the Thebans and Eleans have come to these conclusions [tau`ta ejgnwkovte~]: he said that they arrange their paidika beside themselves in battle even though they are sleeping with them” (Xen. Symp. 8.32–34). Dover thought that the relative chronology of these two texts and their possible relation to historical developments at Thebes was crucial. He dated Plato’s Symposium on internal grounds to after 385 and observed that the first activities that tradition ascribes to the Sacred Band can be dated to 375. Detecting an explicit allusion to an erotic Sacred Band in Xenophon, but not in Plato, he judged that Xenophon’s Symposium must postdate Plato’s, and that the Sacred Band must have been founded at some time between the publication dates of the two works.37 But this argument, which has been remarkably influential, suffers from two serious weaknesses. First, Plato’s failure to mention Thebes in connection with Phaedrus’s fan- tasy of a city or army of lovers and beloveds need not imply that the Sacred Band was not yet in existence: it is quite possible that he consciously avoided mentioning a new Sacred Band by name in order to maintain the fiction of his dramatic date of 416, confident that his sophisticated reader would still “get” the allusion to contemporary Theban practice. Second, and more im- portant, Dover’s relative dating of the two texts and the foundation of the Sacred Band depends on his assumption that Xenophon’s Symposium consti- tutes good evidence for the existence of an erotic army at Thebes. We have already seen that the later tradition of an erotic Sacred Band rests on shaky foundations; any doubts about the evidentiary value of this passage would threaten to render Dover’s chronological argument circular.38

So what does the passage from Xenophon tell us about the military practices of the Thebans? We should keep in mind, first of all, that this pas- sage does not refer to the Sacred Band by name. Furthermore, whatever it is that the Thebans and Eleans do, it is represented as being different— at least quantitatively and possibly also qualitatively — from a fighting force (stravteuma)  composed  exclusively  of  lovers  and  beloveds:  the  military practices of the Thebans and Eleans are offered as an analogy to justify at- tempting what Pausanias presents as a utopian experiment (cf. a]n gevnoito). Why propose creating a an army of lovers and beloveds if that very thing already exists? Now let us consider the way that Socrates represents Pausa- nias’s claim about the Thebans and Eleans: they station beside themselves youths with whom they are currently sleeping.39 The presence of paidika on campaign, as we have seen, is not unknown: in the Hellenica, Xenophon de- scribed the death of the Spartan commander Anaxibius near his beloved, and here in Xenophon’s Symposium, just after the passage quoted above, Socrates implies that Spartan lovers were sometimes stationed near their

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beloveds when he states that Spartan youths fight bravely “even among for- eigners and whenever they are not stationed in the same place as their lover” [kai; meta; xevnwn ka]n mh; ejn th`Ê aujth`Ê [povlei] tacqw`si tw`/ ejrasth`Ê] (Xen. Symp. 8.35).40 What Socrates considers noteworthy about the Thebans and Eleans, in contrast to the Spartans, is that they pursue a distinctly carnal interest in their beloveds (8.34–35): men in all three cities —Thebes, Elis, and Sparta

— are represented as sometimes stationing themselves near their beloveds, but the Thebans and Eleans do this “even though they are sleeping with them [sugkaqeuvdonta~ gou`n].”

It is the carnality of Theban and Elean pederasty that Pausanias finds useful in his attempt to justify his utopian proposal for creating a fighting force of carnal lovers and beloveds. His argument is indeed just one in a se- ries of arguments that apologists for conventional pederasty have advanced to justify their carnal desires, and Socrates is prepared to combat them one by one through a combination of peremptory denial and rational argu- ment.41 In response to the argument that Ganymede was the catamite of Zeus, Socrates insists that Zeus loved Ganymede not for his body, but for his mind (psyche¯), and brings forth as proof both an etymology of Gany- mede’s name (“taking pleasure [ganu-] in the mind [me¯d-]”) and the claim that Ganymede was the only one of Zeus’s loves who was made immortal (Xen. Symp. 8.29–30). And he attacks the argument that Achilles and Pa- troclus and other heroic pairs were conventional pederastic couples 42 by denying that Homer made Patroclus a paidika and arguing that it is perverse to think that heroes would be motivated to perform great deeds because they slept with each other (sugkaqeuvdein, the same word that was used of the carnal interests of the Thebans and Eleans) (8.31).

Socrates adopts a similar approach to Pausanias’s claims about eros and military valor. He begins by emphasizing the physicality of the love that Pausanias advocates — thus, Pausanias himself is described as an “apologist [ajpologouvmeno~] for those who wallow in lack of self-control [akrasia]” (8.32)— and proceeds to use this prejudicial characterization to attack Pau- sanias’s general argument about the salutary effect of shame in motivating battlefield bravery in lover and beloved: it is impossible, Socrates argues, to believe that men so devoted to shameless conduct in the bedroom would avoid shameless conduct on the battlefield in the presence of their paidika (8.33). Socrates’ argument, then, seizes on the carnality of Pausanias’s lovers in arms (“even though they are sleeping with them”), not the wisdom of ranging lovers and paidika side by side in battle. Socrates then turns to Pau- sanias’s claims about the military practices of the Thebans and Eleans. He first suggests that the Thebans and Eleans are not relevant to their discussion

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of Athenian eros, since those peoples are subject to a very different moral- ity: carnal pederasty is “customary [novmima] for them, blameworthy [ejpo- neivdista] among us” (8.34). In Plato’s Symposium, the erotic otherness of the Thebans and Eleans was invoked by none other than Pausanias as a way to justify the “complicated” [poikivlo~] approach of the Athenians (Pl. Symp. 182a); in Xenophon, Socrates deliciously turns a version of the same argu- ment against Pausanias himself. Socrates’ second assault on Pausanias’s The- ban and Elean “evidence” is to suggest that, far from promoting military valor, their practice seems to indicate that lovers in these cities do not trust their paidika to behave virtuously; Spartan youths, by contrast, do not need to be stationed beside their lovers in order to fight bravely (Xen. Symp.

8.34–35). Rather than deny the truth of Pausanias’s so-called evidence from Thebes and Elis, Socrates essentially stipulates to it (with a distancing “he said”) for the sake of argument and then proceeds to attack Pausanias’s po- sition on moralistic grounds.

Pausanias’s reference to Elis alongside Thebes is another clue that the primary function of this “evidence” is to deliver rhetorical punch. For while there is an elaborate later tradition about an erotic battalion at Thebes, there is not a single piece of evidence that corroborates Pausanias’s claim about the Elean military.43 This “Elis” is not a place about which Pausanias has au- thentic knowledge, and neither, in this context, is “Thebes.” The pair “Thebes and Elis” functioned as a symbol of sexual permissiveness within Athenian debates about pederasty, just as “Sparta” frequently functioned as a symbol of sexual self-restraint. Xenophon, in his Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, uses the Boeotians and Eleans as foils for the purely platonic friendships between Spartan men and boys: here the Boeotians are imagined as hav- ing intercourse with boys as “married” pairs (suzugevnte~ oJmilou`sin) and the Eleans as obtaining physical gratification from boys in exchange for gifts (2.12–13). It is interesting that here, where Xenophon speaks in his own name, he makes no mention of erotic military customs for either Thebes or Elis. Plato in the Symposium deploys “Boeotians” and “Eleans” in a very similar way, there as foils for the “moral problematization” character- istic of Athenian and Spartan pederasty (Pl. Symp. 182b). When one refers to “Thebes and Elis” in Athenian discussions of paiderastia, one is not invok- ing authentic knowledge of these places, but rather an ethnographic, cultural “knowledge”.44 One can no more believe that Thebans and Eleans were completely lacking in sexual self-control than that the Spartans never got past first base (pace Xenophon) or that more than a handful of Athenians ruined sex with “moral problematization” (pace Plato). For the Athenians,

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whose stage was graced by the likes of Laius and Oedipus, “Thebes” in par- ticular represented an erotic “other.” 45

It is tempting to suggest that Socrates has chosen to focus on an apol- ogetic argument about the military practices of the Thebans and Eleans (rather than, say, an apologetic argument about the tyrant slayers at Ath- ens) because Thebes and Elis were such easy targets for his attack on sexual relationships between men and boys. The real Pausanias might well have made the arguments Socrates attributes to him. But the similarity between Pausanias’s general claim about the salutary effects of erotic taxis and that articulated by Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium suggest that the fantasy was in the public domain, and that different authors might attribute the sentiment to different speakers for rhetorical effect. And it is not difficult to guess at Xenophon’s motivation in attributing the idea to Pausanias, whom he in- troduces as “the lover of the poet Agathon”: the relationship between Pau- sanias and Agathon was notorious not only for continuing long after Aga- thon became a man, but also for remaining an unabashedly sexual one.46 So what is the status of Pausanias’s claim about the military practices of the Thebans and Eleans? I would argue that it has about the same status as the argument that Homer’s Achilles and Patroclus were lovers. Both are the fantasies of an apologist for conventional pederasty. Although there were some who believed that Achilles and Patroclus were indeed lovers (they could look to Aeschylus for support), many others felt that this was a mis- reading of Homer. So too the argument about the erotic military customs of the Thebans and Eleans. I suspect that someone had given an erotic in- terpretation to some actual feature of Theban military life, and that this conscious eroticization came to be repeated, by some still as fantasy and by others now as fact. Was there a Theban institution ripe for reimagining along erotic lines? One possibility is the custom whereby Theban lovers presented their beloveds with suits of armor when the latter came of age. Another possibility is the elite pairs of “charioteers and footmen” that Di- odorus tells us fought at Delium. We have “pairs of men” in an elite band at Thebes, the home of Laius and of carnal excess: the inference that these

pairs were erotic was easily made.47

But not everyone accepted this fanciful erotic interpretation of Theban military customs. Xenophon was surely one. Xenophon was a military ex- pert and can be expected to have had good information about the military organizations of other states. Not only does Xenophon not speak in his own name in the Symposium,48 but when he does speak in propria persona in the Hellenica, for instance, he has nothing to say about an erotic Theban army.

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This in spite of the fact that he devotes countless pages in the Hellenica to the activities of the Theban military during the years from 375 until 362, years that the Sacred Band was supposedly active, sometimes giving great detail about the constitution of the battle line. Alleged anti-Theban bias is probably, as we have seen, a red herring: Ephorus’s pro-Theban account also does not mention any Sacred Band, much less an erotic one. Xeno- phon’s Socrates might stipulate to Pausanias’s “evidence” of erotic military traditions in Thebes and Elis in order to make out an argument against car- nal love. But this is not a tradition Xenophon the military historian puts any stock in.

There is even less reason to suppose that Plato is alluding to an erotic Sacred Band. Arguments that Plato does, through Phaedrus, allude to an erotic Sacred Band have always depended ultimately on the reliability of the Sacred Band tradition as a whole and of Xenophon’s “evidence” for it in particular. But with that tradition in doubt and with no explicit reference in Phaedrus’s speech to Thebes or Boeotia, it seems far wiser to look else- where for a context for Phaedrus’s proposal. In fact, the notion that the presence of one’s beloved brings the best out of a man was something of a topos in fourth-century Athenian moral discourse. Xenophon himself speaks approvingly of the general concept in his treatise On Hunting (12.20), and Plato makes use of the idea in a more political context in book 5 of the Republic, where Socrates proposes that men who distinguish themselves in battle (ajristeuvsanta) be given the privilege of kissing and being kissed by anyone they wish from among the boys and lads who accompany them on campaign (uJpo; tw`n sustrateuomevnwn meirakivwn te kai; paivdwn) (468bc). The scenario envisioned here is a bit different from the one envisioned in the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon, for eros is imagined to motivate val- iant behavior in the adult lover alone. The presence of boys and lads on cam- paign (sustrateuomevnwn) in this fanciful passage from the Republic does not, of course, mean that paides and meirakia served in the Athenian or any other fourth-century army, unless we are prepared to accept Plato’s reference to women on campaign (Rep. 471d) as a reflection of reality. Plato here, and in Phaedrus’s speech in the Symposium, thinks of the army as a model of the polis as a whole, an equation that was not uncommon in Greek uto- pian thought.49

This brings us to another observation about Phaedrus’s proposal in Plato’s Symposium: it is distinctly utopian in form. It is an example of a ge- neric argument attested in Herodotus, Thucydides, and elsewhere in Plato that takes the form “if state X were governed according to principle Y, it

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would be the strongest and most unified in the world.” 50 In the next section, we shall consider how this utopian form of argument became attached to notions about the salutary effects of eros, but first I would like to return briefly to the testimony of Polyaenus. We might be inclined to trust the au- thor of a work called Strate¯ge¯mata [Military stratagems] when he tells us that the Sacred Band was composed of pairs of lovers and beloveds. But con- sider the language he employs: “The band was three hundred lovers and be- loveds. Because they loved each other, they would [a]n] never flee, but would either die on behalf of each other or would defeat the enemy” (2.5.1). The lack of historical specificity in this report is foreign to the practice of Poly- aenus, who generally provides straightforward battle narratives, including in his numerous anecdotes about Leuctra and Chaeronea.51 It is the poten- tial optative, really, that gives him away: this passage, which poses as a quasi- historical anecdote, is really just a reframing of Phaedrus’s utopian vision, except that whereas the Thebans were originally brought forth (e.g., by Xen- ophon’s Pausanias) as fanciful evidence to support such a utopian pro- posal, the Theban Sacred Band has now come to embody it.52

 

 

Utopian Philosophy and the Sacred Band

 

If the legend of the Sacred Band acquired much of its character from the panegyric history of Callisthenes and his local Boeotian sources, it seems to have acquired its erotic content from one remarkably influential strand of fourth-century political philosophy. There are hints of the role philosophy would play in the shaping of Theban history already in Pausanias’s clever use of “evidence” about Thebes and Elis, but the full effects of this philosophi- cal intervention are not felt until somewhat later and are discernable by us first in the third-century Peripatetic philosopher Hieronymus of Rhodes. Hieronymus placed the Sacred Band at the head of a list of examples in which paiderastia helped to bring down tyranny (fr. 34 Wehrli).53 What does the Sacred Band have to do with the toppling of tyrannies? Maximus of Tyre, in his digression on Thebes’s “sacred band of love,” explains: just as Harmodius and Aristogeiton liberated Athens from the Pisistratids, so Epaminondas “liberated Thebes from Spartan rule through an erotic strata- gem” (18.2). It is not clear whether Maximus is thinking here of Tegyra and Leuctra, battles that led to the expulsion of the Spartans from Boeotia, or possibly to the liberation of the Cadmea from the Spartan garrison in 379, a success that was more widely credited to another famous stratagem, this

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one involving beardless youths dressed as women.54 What is important is that certain activities of the Sacred Band in the 370s had become refash- ioned as examples of resistance to tyranny. Hieronymus’s reference to the role of the philosophical Epaminondas suggests that he too was thinking, at least in part, of the Sacred Band’s liberation of Boeotia from Spartan rule in the 370s. But he may also have had in mind another tyrannical adver- sary. For one of the other examples Hieronymus gave of pederastic couples who resisted tyranny was the pair Chariton and Melanippus, who attempted to assassinate Phalaris, the sixth-century tyrant of Acragas; when their plan was foiled, they so impressed Phalaris with their bravery under torture that he released the two with praise. This story is interesting because a structur- ally similar tale is told by Plutarch in connection with the Sacred Band: so moved was Philip at the sight of the fallen bodies of three hundred lovers and beloveds at Chaeronea that he declared, “May those who think these men did or suffered anything disgraceful perish miserably!” (Pel. 18.5).55 Philip here is presented as a sort of tyrant figure who, like the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris, is moved by the sight of men and youths joined together in love for each other and for freedom. It is tempting to think that Hieronymus had in mind also this stand of the Sacred Band against Philip at Chaeronea when he ranked the Sacred Band first in a list of lovers who resisted tyranny. Hieronymus’s views about the political advantages of pederastic love have a respectable philosophical pedigree. The idea that men bound to one another by love are the staunchest defenders of liberty was articulated in the fourth century by Heraclides Ponticus (fr. 65 Wehrli) and Phanias (frs. 14–16 Wehrli), and even earlier, and perhaps first, by Plato in the Sympo- sium, where he has Pausanias argue that tyrants are hostile to the institution of pederasty because they cannot tolerate the free thinking of men bound by love, and that it was because of their love for each other that Harmodius and Aristogeiton brought down the tyranny at Athens (Symp. 182bc).56 Ty- rants were, of course, just as well known for being pederasts themselves (and abusive ones at that) 57 as they were for being hostile to the institution of pederasty. But it is Pausanias’s opposition between pederasty and tyranny that becomes influential on later erotic discourse 58 and on the develop-

ment of the legend of the Sacred Band in particular.

The legend of the Sacred Band has some affinity, then, with philosophi- cal discussions about the role of pederasty in Greek political life, although it is not yet clear why men and youths bound in love were believed to be uniquely qualified to resist tyranny, or why Plato’s Phaedrus might want to create a whole “city or army” of such pairs. The answer to this question is

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to be found in a tradition of utopian speculation about the best way to con- stitute the polis, and there are traces of this utopian tradition in some of the texts that describe an erotic Sacred Band. Let us return to the anecdote about Pammenes’ critique of Homeric taxis. In the Life of Pelopidas, Plutarch reports that Pammenes rebuked Nestor for drawing up battle lines by tribe and phratry rather than by pairs of lovers and beloveds, claiming that it was common knowledge that men would abandon their family members in a moment of danger, but a lover would never abandon his beloved or vice versa. In the Quaestiones Conviviales, Plutarch repeats Pammenes’ critique and there describes the result of erotic taxis as a phalanx that “breathes together as one” [suvmpnou~] and “is bound together organically” [e[myucon e[cousa desmovn].59

Embedded in this humorous anecdote is what appears to be a serious political argument: the relationship between lover and beloved affords a better context for the citizen to benefit his polis than the relationship be- tween family members. The contrast between kinship and erotic relation- ships turns up also in the speech of Plato’s Phaedrus, and there, as we have seen, the argument is more broadly political, articulated so as to justify cre- ation of a “city or army” [povlin . . . h] stratovpedon] (Symp. 178e–179a) oflovers and beloveds. Indeed, in this context, “army” is nothing more than a designation of the “city” in its defensive mode. Now these comments of Pammenes and Phaedrus take the form of empirical observations about hu- man nature— that the presence of a lover generates a greater sense of shame than the presence of a family member— and they recall the more general doctrine attributed to Socrates by Aeschines of Sphettus that eros can stimu- late one to cultivate virtue.60 But the explicit contrast with kinship ties also recalls the argument put forth by many utopian thinkers in the fourth cen- tury that the state is most unified when the social bonds between citizens trump the blood bonds between kin.61 And indeed, unity is central to Pam- menes’ vision: to organize an army along erotic lines is not only to promote valiant behavior in individuals (through the operation of shame), but also to promote cohesion (cf. suvmpnou~… e[myucon desmovn) throughout the army as a whole. If Pammenes suggested that eros could promote unity within an army, Zeno of Citium, in his Republic, argued that eros could play this role in the state more generally. Zeno, like Plato, proposed to abolish the fam- ily,62 presumably in order to destroy the parochial ties of kinship, which were so destructive to civic unity. And one metaphor he chose to describe the social bond between citizens that would take the place of kinship was the erotic bond between lover and beloved, a bond uniquely capable of

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promoting homonoia (political unity) within the city.63 It is probably an ear- lier version of this sort of grand utopian argument that Plato’s Phaedrus is al- luding to when he proposes to create a “city or army” of lovers and beloveds.

The general notion of eros as a force that binds citizens together appears to be old and widespread. Aphrodite was often worshiped in Greek cities as a deity concerned with civic unity,64 a function she inherited from her Near Eastern counterpart Ishtar, who was as much a civic and martial goddess as a goddess of love. Where Aphrodite was concerned with the city as a whole, she was given epithets like Pande¯mos (Of all the people), Agoraia (Of the people in assembly), and He¯gemone¯ tou De¯mou (Leader of the people), and etiological myths for these cults are frequently linked to important politi- cal moments in a city’s history, such as synoecism or the adoption of a new constitution. But she was also, in a number of cities, the patron of mag- istrates and in this capacity is thought to have promoted unity amongst magistrates as well as amity between the magistrates and the people.65 One sometimes sees Eros, too, as a god concerned with civic unity more gener- ally. For example, on Samos, the festival of Eros was called the Eleutheria (Festival of freedom); in Thespiae, the most important civic festival was the Erotidia (Festival of Eros); and the Athenians sacrificed to Eros alongside Athena during the Panathenaea, Athens’s annual festival of civic renewal.66 It is in this capacity as promoter of civic cohesion, I think, that Eros was wor- shiped in specifically military contexts. Athenaeus tells us that the Spartans, for instance, “sacrifice to Eros before the troops are drawn up for battle, on the grounds that their safety and victory depend on the friendship of those who are drawn up [ejn th`Ê tw`n paratattomevnwn filiva/]” (561e), and he de-scribes a similar custom for the Cretans. But his third example of Eros’s ca- pacity to promote military cohesion, the Theban Sacred Band, is anomalous: the Theban soldiers, according to Athenaeus, are differentiated hierarchi- cally according to sexual role (lovers and beloveds), whereas the Spartans appear to be social equals; and the Thebans are bound together in eros (erotic passion), while the Spartans, he states quite clearly, are united in philia (friendship). Athenaeus’s juxtaposition of these two rather different phenomena hints that the legend of an erotic Sacred Band may have origi- nated as an exaggeration of the custom of some cities (e.g., Sparta and the cities of Crete) to sacrifice to Eros in order to promote philia among their men in arms.

In view of this broader sense of eros as a force that brings people to- gether, it is perhaps not surprising that philosophers sometimes described the bond between citizens in terms not only of philia, but even of eros. For example, Aristotle, in a discussion of the importance of philia as a unifying

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force within the state, critiques the celebrated speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium as a political argument. In Aristotle’s view, Aristophanes’ call for a merging (sumfu`nai) of lover and beloved goes too far: the re- sult is not unity, but obliteration (Pol. 1262b8–18). The kind of philia that promotes civic unity is one that recognizes the autonomy and individual identity of each citizen. What is interesting for our purposes is that Aristotle can view Aristophanes’ argument about eros as, in part, an argument about how the polis should be constituted.67

What is puzzling is that the eros that Plato’s Phaedrus and Zeno speak of is not just eros as a generic force of social cohesion, but a distinctly ped- erastic eros. And pederastic eros is not at all an obvious metaphor to describe the political bonds between citizens. Given the hierarchical nature of the pederastic relationship, the metaphor was well suited to describe the repli- cation of the citizen body from generation to generation: indeed, it appears that pederasty was sometimes promoted, especially among the well born, as a form of “displaced fathering” and recruitment of the political elite.68 Pederasty might also be an appropriate metaphor to describe the harmo- nious political relations between generations: Plutarch, in fact, suggests that the Theban lawgiver instituted pederasty in order to balance the im- petuosity of youth with the grace and deliberative capacity of maturity (Pel. 19.2). But the hierarchical bond between lover and beloved would seem to be far less suited to describe the relations between citizens of the same rank and age.69 How did this specifically pederastic vision of a city of lovers and beloveds develop from the more general notion of eros as a force that ani- mates the philia between citizens and between soldiers? Schofield has ar- gued that Zeno’s city of love was inspired by the prominent role that insti- tutionalized pederasty was believed to have played in the Spartan system,70 and one wonders whether an idealized image of Sparta does not also lurk behind the proposal made by Plato’s Phaedrus to create a city or army of lovers and beloveds. The pederastic bond, then, may have been chosen as a metaphor for civic cohesion not because of the hierarchical nature of the bond, but in spite of it: what was important was that pederasty of a highly institutional type was Spartan and thus thought to be a key ingredient be- hind Spartan military success. Another source of this specifically pederastic civic metaphor might be the figure of Socrates, who was known to have de- scribed his entire philosophical approach as fundamentally “erotic.” It is tempting to see in the notion of a city of lovers and beloveds an elite So- cratic society composed of well-born men and youths who do not merely philosophize about what is just for the city, but actually implement it. Such an elite society may well be reflected in Plato’s society of guardians, whose

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bravest fighters (fuvlake~, or “guards”) will be rewarded with kisses from the most beautiful youths, and in Zeno’s society of sages, who “will fall in love with [ejrasqhvsesqai] youths who reveal through their appearance a natural propensity for virtue” (D.L. 7.129).

The utopian proposal for a city (or army) of lovers and beloveds, what- ever the ultimate philosophical origin, appears to have been made in the name of political unity, and it is unity that enabled a city to counter the threats of enemies abroad and tyrants at home. This connection between pederastic eros and political freedom is made explicit by Zeno: “Eros was a god who promoted friendship [philia], freedom [eleuthe¯ria], and also unity [homonoia]” and “helped to promote the safety [sote¯ria] of the state” (Ath. 561c). Zeno’s terminology is as much political as it is militaristic: while so- te¯ria refers most directly to success against external threats, eleuthe¯ria can des- ignate “freedom” from tyranny as well as from external domination.71 This complex of ideas, which we see articulated so clearly in Zeno, is implicit al- ready in the sympotic speeches of Plato’s Phaedrus and Pausanias and sup- plies the larger philosophical context in which to understand Pammenes’ speculation about the sources of military (and civic) cohesion and the Sa- cred Band’s deployment of such cohesion against tyrants.

The legend of the Sacred Band seems to have begun in the early fourth century as a fanciful real-world analogy that initially supported and ulti- mately replaced a utopian proposal to build a city or army on the en- nobling bond between lover and beloved. The citizens of this ideal polis would be unified and conspicuous in their love of liberty, and it was per- haps this idea that gave the Theban Sacred Band a history. For although an actual Sacred Band — if there even was one— must have fought many battles from 375 to 338, the tradition of the Sacred Band focused on just three battles in which the man-loving Thebans fought tyrants on Boeotian soil: Tegyra and Leuctra, where the Thebans toppled the Spartan hegemony and restored freedom to Boeotia and Greece, and Chaeronea, where they fell bravely to the tyrannical Philip, who brought Greek liberty to an end. Tegyra and Leuctra had probably already been fashioned into stands against tyranny in Callisthenes’ Hellenica, and possibly already in the obscure Boe- otian chroniclers on whom Callisthenes is supposed to have drawn, and Chaeronea, Thebes’s answer to the heroic stand of Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, may have come to be understood in similar terms. But it was not until this panegyric history became attached to the erotic political philosophy of men like Plato, Xenophon’s Pausanias, and Zeno of Citium that the legend of the Sacred Band acquired its dis- tinctive erotic dimension.

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Notes

Thanks are due to Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Kathryn Morgan, Thomas Hubbard, and Martha Nussbaum, who each commented extensively on an earlier version of the ar- gument presented here. An oral version was presented in February 1999 at the Univer- sity of Chicago and benefited from the keen questions of many of those in attendance.

1. See, e.g., Dover 1965; Buffière 1980, 95–101; Sergent 1986, 44–52; DeVoto

1992; and Ogden 1996, 111–15. Buck 1994, 110–11, for one, is skeptical.

2. The origin of the name, mentioned first in Dinarchus 1.73, is obscure. In Ho- mer, the epithet iJerov~ is used of an army (stratov~, Od . 24.81) and of small groups of guards (Il. 10.56, 24.681), and there the word probably retains its more archaic mean- ing of “strong” or perhaps “endowed with (divinely-inspired) strength” (see Chan- traine 1968– 80, s.v. iJerov~). It may be significant that the phrase iJero;~ stratov~ in Hom. Od. 24.81 was used to describe the Achaean army when it buried Achilles, Pa- troclus, and Antilochus, all three associated later with pederastic love. See also Plut. Amat. 760c, where lovers who defend their beloveds against the clutches of tyrants are said to defend them “as though defending holy [iJeroi`~] and inviolable shrines.”

3. Tegyra: Plut. Pel. 16.2, 19.3; cf. Diod. 15.81.2. Leuctra: Dinarchus 1.72; Cor- nelius Nepos Pel. 4.2; Plut. Pel. 20.4; Diod. 15.81.2; Dio Chrys. 22.2; Maximus of Tyre

18.2. Chaeronea: Plut. Pel. 18.5, Alex. 19.2.

4. All translations of Greek and Latin texts are the author’s.

5. Anderson 1970, 158–9 and 311–12 nn. 35–36; Buck 1994, 110–11; Ogden 1996, 114–15. Like this force of three hundred at Delium, the Sacred Band was also supposed to have fought in front, spread out across the length of the army, until Pelop- idas detached them from the rest of the army and constituted them as a self-standing unit (Plut. Pel. 19.3). Interestingly, Thucydides’ account of the Battle of Delium (4.89–

101) makes no mention of this force.

6. Buffière 1980, 100; Ogden 1996, 113.

7. Quarreling: Xen. An. 5.8.4. Pursuing boys: Xen. An. 4.6.1–3, 7.4.7– 8, Hell.

5.4.57; Polyaenus 5.3.4; cf. Xen. An. 4.1.14, Ages. 5.4–5.

8. Cartledge 1981, 32 n. 32, has questioned whether he was even a Spartan.

9. Cf. Ael. 4.1, who describes an adolescent (meirakion) beloved as “not yet called to arms because of his age” [kalouvmenon de; diæ hJlikivan ej~ o{pla mhdevpw]. See also Og- den 1996, 109. Plut. Lyc. 18.4, which describes Spartan lovers being penalized when their beloveds are heard to cry “while fighting” [ejn tw`/ mavcesqai], is most likely a refer- ence to mock battles in which boys in the agela engaged (see Plut. Lyc. 16.5, 17.2).

10. This was clearly the case with the paidika of Cleomachus of Chalcis during the Lelantine War: “He asked his eromenos, who was present, whether he was going to watch the battle” (Plut. Amat. 760ef).

11. Many other cases are ambiguous. Asopichus, once the eromenos of Epaminon- das, is said to have died beside him at Mantineia (Plut. Amat. 761d), but there is no evidence that the two were still actively beloved and lover. Likewise, the Spartan Archi- damus lamented the death of his beloved Kleonymus, who died at Leuctra (Xen. Hell. 5.4.33), but we do not know that Archidamus was even present at the battle, nor can

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we assume that they were still sexually involved. A legend from Megara says that the hero Diocles protected his beloved in battle, before perishing himself (Scholia ad Theocr. 12.27–33), but here too it is not clear that the beloved was actually armed, and the myth is, in any event, designed to play up the erotic aspects of the cult of Dio- cles at Megara. See also Plut. Amat. 761c; Ael. NA 4.1.

12. At Potidaea, Socrates saved the wounded Alcibiades, “not wishing to abandon him” (Pl. Symp. 220e). At Delium, Alcibiades, on horseback, vowed not to abandon Socrates and Laches, who were on foot (221a). Plato makes it clear that the joint mili- tary service took place after Alcibiades’ attempted seduction of Socrates (see 219e: tau`tav [Alcibiades’ attempted seduction] te gavr moi a{panta prougegovnei, kai; meta; tau`ta strateiva hJmi`n eij~ Poteivdaian ejgevneto koinh; kai; sunesitou`men ejkei`.).

13. See, e.g., Polyaenus 2.5.1: “the band was composed of three hundred lovers and beloveds” [oJ lovco~ h\n ejrastai; kai; ejrwvmenoi triakovsioi]; Plut. Pel. 18.1: “this force was created out of lovers and beloveds” [ejx ejrastw`n kai; ejrwmevnwn genevsqai to; suvsthma tou`to].

14. Greeks of the classical period seem generally not to have used the terms erastes (lover) and eromenos (beloved) of a relationship that had ceased to be sexual. See, e.g., Thuc. 1.132.5 (reference to the former beloved of the Spartan king Pausanias as pai- dikav pote w]n aujtou`); Aeschin. 1.155–57 (contrast between men who were eromenoi in the past and youths who are eromenoi at the present).

15. Suits of armor: Plut. Amat. 761b. Oaths: Arist. fr. 97 Rose; Plut. Amat. 761de.

16. Ritual presentation of armor in Crete: Ephorus FGrH 70 F 149 = Strab.

10.4.21. Oaths: in the cities of Hellenistic Crete, citizenship oaths marked a boy’s graduation from his military training in the agela (herd) system (see, e.g., Inscriptiones Creticae 1.19.1, 2.5.24).

17. Dinarchus 1.72–73; Hieronymus of Rhodes fr. 34 Wehrli = Ath. 602ab; Cor- nelius Nepos Pel. 4.2; Diod. 15.81.2; Dio Chrys. 22.2; Plut. Pel. 17.2, 20.2, 23.2; Plut. Pel. 18–19, which, as we shall see, draws on a different source than the passages from the Pelopidas just cited and must therefore be treated as an independent reference to the Sacred Band; Plut. Alex. 9.2; Polyaenus 2.5.1; Maximus of Tyre 18.2; Ath. 561f. On pos- sible references in Plat. Symp. 178e–179b and Xen. Symp. 8.34, see “Plato and Xeno- phon” below. I leave out Plut. Amat. 761b, which alludes vaguely to an erotic battle formation implemented by the Theban Pammenes; Anna Comnena Alexias 7.7.1–3, which mistakenly attributes a hieros lochos (without any claims about its composition) to the Spartans; and Hesychius s.v. hieros lochos, which does not identify the band as Theban (he could as well be referring to the Carthaginian hieros lochos mentioned at Diod. 16.80.4, 20.10.6, 20.11.1, 20.12.3, 20.12.7).

18. Plutarch: Westlake 1939; Georgiadou 1997, 19–24; cf. Alex. 27.4, 33.1, 33.10,

which draw on Callisthenes’ Praxeis Alexandrou. Diodorus: Westlake 1939, 11, 16–17.

Nepos: Westlake 1939, 11–12; Georgiadou 1997, 38–39. Dinarchus: Shrimpton 1971,

313–14, 317.

19. Jacoby 1919, 1697; Westlake 1939, 13.

20. They are Pammenes’ famous rebuke of Homer for not arranging lovers beside their beloveds, which is mentioned yet again in Plut. Quaest. conv. 618b – d, and Aris- totle’s reference to lovers swearing oaths around the tomb of Iolaus, which Ross has assigned to Aristotle’s Erotikos as fr. 2.

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21. E.g., the notion that lovers and beloveds are ashamed to behave in a cowardly way in the presence of each other (Pel. 18.2–3 beside Pl. Symp. 178d, 179a; see also Xen. Symp. 8.33, Cyn. 12.20). It is interesting that in the Symposium passage, Phaedrus justifies his proposal for a city or army of lovers and beloveds by observing that lovers are much more loyal to their beloveds than relatives or friends, a sentiment very simi- lar to that of the passage from the Phaedrus, in which the full expression entheos philos is employed: it is quite possible that Plutarch, who is probably quoting from memory, has conflated these two Platonic references to the lover as entheos (Phaedrus 255b and Symp. 179a).

22. Pace Dover 1965, 11–12. On this tradition of erotic writing, see Schofield 1991, 28; Parker 1992, 100–101; Kahn 1994.

23. Hieronymus of Rhodes fr. 34 Wehrli and commentary ad loc. The fragment may even have come from Hieronymus’s Symposium, although Wehrli assigns it to the Historika Hypomne¯mata [Historical anecdotes].

24. Plut. Pel. 17.2 = Callisthenes FGrH 124 F 18. See esp. Sordi 1989, 124–25.

25. Diodorus’s mention of Tegyra, Pelopidas, and the Sacred Band at 15.81 seems clearly to come from a different source, undoubtedly Callisthenes. See Sordi 1989, 124.

26. Jacoby ad FGrH 125 F 18; Sordi 1989, 124–25. For a general discussion of the topography and strategy of the battle, see Buckler 1995.

27. Callisthenes ap. Cornelius Nepos Pel. 4.2. Nepos’s linking of Pelopidas and the delectus manus with the victory at Leuctra suggests that Nepos here followed Callisthe- nes rather than Ephorus.

28. Hanson 1988. On the low esteem of Ephorus and Callisthenes as military his- torians, see Polyb. 12.17–22, 12.25f.3– 4. Bibliography on Xenophon’s alleged anti- Theban bias and on the alleged superiority of later accounts of the Battle of Leuctra may be found in Hanson 1988, 191 n. 3.

29. If Callisthenes did discuss the role of the Sacred Band at Chaeronea, it would not have been in the Hellenica, whose account ended in 356 with the beginning of the third Sacred War, but in the Praxeis Alexandrou [Exploits of Alexander].

30. See, e.g., Pritchett 1958, 310–11; Parke 1970.

31. Hammond 1938, 216–18, suggests that the monument marked the burial of the Macedonians, rather than the Thebans, as Pausanias claimed, and indeed Pausanias himself may be combating such a view at 9.40.7, when he insists that Philip was not accustomed to setting up trophies.

32. Four different founders are identified by the sources: Pammenes (if Plut. Amat. 761b is in fact a reference to the Sacred Band); Gorgidas (Plut. Pel. 19.3; Polyaenus 2.5.1); Pelopidas (Plut. Pel. 19.3 suggests he reorganized it as a separate battalion); and Epaminondas (Dio Chrys. 22.2; Plut. Quaest. conv. 618cd; Maximus of Tyre 18.2), to whom there was a tendency later to attribute all Theban innovations (see Hanson 1988, 192–99, 204–5).

33. Cf. Jacoby 1919, 1697; Georgiadou 1997, 154; pace Dover 1965, 12; Sergent 1986, 47. On this linguistic distancing strategy, see Pauw 1980, 90–91; Hammond 1993, 6– 8, 11, 17, etc. See also the levgetai at Plut. Alex. 9.2, which introduces the claim that Alexander was the first to defeat the Sacred Band.

34. Fuscagni 1975; Sordi 1989, 123–28.

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35. On the Pitanate lochos, see Kelly 1981.

36. For other examples from the historians, see Thuc. 1.132.5; 6.53– 61; Xen. Hell. 4.8.39, 5.4.56–7, An. 5.8.4, 7.4.8 and generally Hindley 1994; Theopompus FGrH 115 F 247 = Ath. 604f – 605a.

37. Dover 1965, 9–16. Thesleff 1978 argues that Xenophon wrote in two stages: part of his Symposium was completed before Plato wrote, part of it (especially book 8, from which our passage derives) was written after, and indeed in response to, Plato.

38. There is one additional piece of evidence for the relative chronology of these texts and that is Ath. 216ef, which seems to draw on a work called “Reply to the Parti- san of Socrates” [Pro;~ to;n filoswkravthn] by the Hellenistic literary critic Herodicus of Babylon. Herodicus /Athenaeus assumes that Xenophon’s portrait of Pausanias is based on Plato’s portrait of him: because Plato’s Pausanias did not say the things that Xeno- phon attributed to him in his Symposium, Herodicus /Athenaeus assumes that they  either occurred in a different version of Plato’s Symposium or were invented by Xeno- phon. What is interesting is that Herodicus /Athenaeus assumes that these two passages are in dialogue with one another and reflective of debates within the Socratic circle; this excerpt from Herodicus does not mention the possibility that these passages refer to some independent historical reality.

39. Hence the force of the present participle sugkaqeuvdonta~.

40. See Dover 1989, 192. Lange’s bracketing of povlei has been accepted by Mar- chant in the Oxford text.

41. See Hindley 1999, 91–98, who contrasts the chasteness that Socrates advocates in this speech with the less rigid view toward male love advocated by Xenophon him- self and by Socrates elsewhere in the Xenophontic corpus.

42. This argument was apparently also made in the defense of Timarchus (Aeschin. 1.133); in that case, Aeschines responded not, like Xenophon’s Socrates, by denying that the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was erotic (even as he acknowl- edges Homer’s silence on the matter), but by stressing instead the nobility of their love, which stands in stark contrast to the mercenary liaisons of Timarchus (1.141–50).

43. Xen. Hell. 7.4.13, 16, 31 describes an elite Elean force of three hundred but gives no hint of any erotic composition. The supposed male beauty contest at Elis, whose winner received a shield (Ath. 609f), is irrelevant, pace Buffière 1980, 89–91; Sergent 1986, 139– 41.

44. Cf. Maximus of Tyre 20.8; 39.5.

45. In virtue of the border it shared with Athens, Thebes was probably the original “other” within Athenian social discourse. See generally Zeitlin 1990.

46. Dover 1989, 84, 144.

47. Cf. also the force of “many young men and the best older men” that Epami- nondas and Gorgidas, two men credited with organizing the Sacred Band, assembled to expel the Spartans from Thebes in 379 (Plut. Pel. 12.2).

48. The epitomizer of Athenaeus even suggests that he put the proposal for an erotic battalion into Socrates’ mouth “jokingly” [geloivw~]. Ath. Epitome vol. 2.1 p. 81 Peppink.

49. See Ferguson 1975, 24–25, 58; Sordi 1973, 83– 85.

50. Dover 1965, 14–15, citing Hdt. 5.3.1, Thuc. 2.97.6, Pl. Rep. 471cd, Menex. 100a.

the legend of the sacred band

 

51. Polyaenus’s actual anecdotes about the Theban army at Leuctra (2.3.2–3) and Chaeronea (4.3.2–3) make no mention of the Sacred Band, much less an erotic Sacred Band.

52. Onasander, another strategical writer, states the principle of erotic taxis as a present general condition (Strat e ¯ giko s 24), presenting it as a general principle for gener- als to bear in mind, not as an anecdote associated with a specific historical army.

53. Wehrli prints the entire list at Ath. 602ab as reflecting the thought of Hieronymus.

54. On the tyrannical associations of the oligarchic junta installed by the Spartans, see Plut. Pel. 6.1, 7.2, 9.2, and generally Leitao 1999, 249–50, 254–58, 263– 64.

55. The terminology here is interesting: poiei`n kai; pavscein can refer to military conduct (“fighting and being killed”), but also to sexual roles (“being active and being passive,” which would normatively refer to erastes and eromenos, respectively).

56. Thuc. 6.54–9, in order to combat the argument that Harmodius and Aristo- geiton were motivated by political reasons, claimed that the assassination was precipi- tated instead by an insult that grew out of an erotic rivalry. But Thucydides’ focus on the erotic background of the case is still a far cry from Pausanias’s quite original claim that the erotic was the political.

57. Tyrants (and other bullies) as abusive pederasts: Hipparchus (Plut. Amat. 760bc; cf. Thuc. 6.54; Maximus of Tyre 18.2); Periander of Ambracia (Arist. Pol. 5.10.1311a39– 41; Plut. Amat. 766ef; Maximus of Tyre 18.1); Archias of Corinth (Alexander Aetolus fr. 3.7–10 Powell = Parth. 14; Diod. bk. 8 fr. 10; Plut. Amatoriae Narrationes 772ef; Maximus of Tyre 18.1); and Phalaris of Acragas (Plut. Amat. 760bc; Hieronymus of Rhodes fr. 34 Wehrli = Ath. 602ab). Cf. also Plut. Narr. Am. 773e– 774d on the pederastic abuses of the Spartan harmost in Oreos, avenged (along with other Spartan sexual crimes) by the Thebans at Leuctra.

58. The opposition between tyranny and eros becomes associated, by the time of Athenaeus (602cd), even with the figure of Polycrates of Samos, a tyrant represented in earlier tradition as a consummate paiderast e ¯ s.

59. Cf. also Amat. 761b. When Plutarch tells us at Pel. 18.2 that Pammenes made this rebuke “in jest” [meta; paidia`~], I think he is referring only to Pammenes’ playful- ness in framing his comment as a rebuke of Nestor, and does not mean to undercut the seriousness of his argument.

60. Kahn 1994, 101–3.

61. See Ar. Eccl. 635–7; Pl. Rep. 460cd, 461c – e.

62. I.e., by having women and children held in common: Schofield 1991, 12, 25–26.

63. Ath. 561c = SVF I.61; Schofield 1991, 22–56.

64. Sokolowski 1964; Croiset and Salviat 1966; Burkert 1985, 155.

65. Sokolowski 1964.

66. Samos: Ath. 561f–562a. Thespiae: Plut. Amat. 748f.; Paus. 9.31.3; Ath. 561e. Athens: Ath. 561de; Burkert 1985, 232.

67. Cf. also Pericles’ famous exhortation to his fellow citizens to become “lovers [erastai] of the city” (Thuc. 2.43.1). Here, the erotic metaphor works a bit differently,

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with eros describing the bond between citizen and the state rather than the bond be- tween citizens. Nevertheless, its function is the same: Pericles’ eros is the ultimate sym- bol of his vision of a city in which private interest is wholly subordinated to public interest.

68. See Cartledge 1981, 22, 28–29.

69. Halperin 1990, 95–104, argues that the egalitarianism that was at the heart of Athenian democratic ideology was underwritten by the inviolability of the male citi- zen’s body. To describe the social bond between two citizens in pederastic terms would necessarily be to subordinate one of them socially and sexually.

70. Schofield 1991, 35– 41. See also Pl. Leg. 636bc, 836bc.

71. See Schofield 1991, 48–56.

 

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