"The community of their lives had brought about profound friendship among these men. The camp, for most, took the place of their country; living without a family they transferred the needful tenderness to a companion, and they would fall asleep in the starlight side by side under the same cloak. And then in their perpetual wanderings through all sorts of countries, murders, and adventures, they contracted affections, one for the other, in which the stronger protected the younger in the midst of battles, helped him to cross precipices, sponged the sweat of fevers from his brow, and stole food for him, and the weaker, a child perhaps, who had been picked up on the roadside, and had then become a Mercenary, repaid this devotion by a thousand kindnesses." (Gustave Flaubert: Salammbô).
Though Flaubert pictures here the relations of the warriors during the great Mercenary War in Carthage (241-238 BC) after the First Punic War, he was obviously more influenced by Greek sources, and contemporary events in the French military. Nevertheless I'm convinced that such relations between warriors were never better described than in this fictional novel. On the other hand there aren't any confessions of homosexual mercenaries. One finds traces in court records, and even though one can discover accounts by mercenaries, they are of course always about others. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to see that, although often concealed, homosexuality runs like a golden thread through the history of mercenaries.
When this subject comes up it is often argued that such practices occurred because mercenaries were forced to live without women, and hasty parallels to "prison gays" are constructed. But the matter isn't so simple. In ancient Greece pederasty was a widely accepted practice which wasn't considered in opposition to any military, i.e. manly, qualities. On the contrary, it was apparently most common amongst the martial Spartans. Love between men for the Greeks was something that connected warriors and distinguished them, like the mythical relationship between Achilles and Patroclus or the 150 couples of the Theban city guard, who fell side by side in the battle of Chaeroneia in 338 BC…"
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Amicalement
Armand
