"The Elite Gay Army of Ancient Greece" Topic

"The Sacred Band was an elite military unit from Thebes comprising 150 gay couples. At the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, these 300 gay warriors led the Theban army against the Spartan army. The Thebans won and shattered the Spartan control of Greece.

The Thebans believed gay warriors fought better in order to impress and protect their lovers. If a lover fell during a battle, his partner would fight even harder to avenge his death.

Three thousand years ago in Ancient Greece, being gay or lesbian was not a crime. In fact, in certain situations, the Greeks even encouraged homosexual relationships…"

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Armand

Is this what they call clickbait? I once saw a painting of Napoleon entitled "The greatest homosexual" hanging in a museum in Washington D.C..

From what I've read, Greeks and Celts viewed same-sex partnerships as more valuable than male-female relationships, as women were perceived as lower value. And in some cases, the same-sex relationships included sexual relations.

The Sacred Band was well known as being composed of homosexual partners.

The Spartans had similar ideas.

If you want to discuss Napoleon, that should go in another discussion.

"Gay" as a concept didn't exist back then.
Some Greeks accepted such unions, some did not. Many were indifferent.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Aristotle thought much of it.

300 men does not constitute a 'Gay' army.

More of a floor show.

I just choked on my cup of tea. Very funny.

Here you go. On the toughness of gay men, about three minutes thirty…

YouTube link

This is total B.S. In ancient Greece Homosexuality was punishable by death. You weren't allowed to serve in the military, in the priesthood, all public debates and decision making, serving in government, public festivals, and you were not allowed to go near temples because they would be defiled raising the local city state population to much anger and hatred. Out of a total of eighty thousand vases that were found in Attica alone by archaeologists only thirty depicted homosexual acts. The constitution of the Lacedemonians by Lycurgus and also the constitution of the Athenians by Solon(both totally ignored by historians) still exist which both clearly state that homosexuality is punishable by death. If homosexuality was so prevalent in ancient Greek society like we are lead to believe, how come there was a huge population explosion? You mean to tell me that from Massilia to Emporium to southern Italy including Sicily, Cyrene, Alexandria, Greece, Asia Minor, the Black sea to Alexandria in the farthest
in the depths of Asia we a supposed to believe the evidence from thirty vases and so called scholars who push this homosexual agenda. These fairy tales surfaced in the Renaissance and also during the age of enlightenment. Also ancient texts have been distorted. Another example is the Iliad. Achilles and Patroclus were so supposed to be lovers and in the original texts they are shown to be heterosexual.
Epaminondas and Pelopidas were good friends and not lovers as is claimed by modern scholarly circles(a title they don't deserve).Epaminondas saved the life of Pelopidas during one clash and that's why thy became close friends. As one British historian(who's name escapes me)said some years ago -We have stigmatised a whole civilisation with homosexuality when there is such little evidence for it.

Your historical reference may well be valid (I have no idea) but…..
stigmatised! ???

bit of a value judgement there TB

History is whatever the writers of history say it is. Or whatever the re-writers of history say it is. You would think history is fixed, but it is always changing by the propagandists.

TB, you need to read more primary sources. I'm not saying anything more here, but have a word with a real historian or classicist and get a reading list.
I repeat, PRIMARY sources.

"… If homosexuality was so prevalent in ancient Greek society like we are lead to believe, how come there was a huge population explosion?…"

Seems you don't have interacted with many homosexuals at work or in your private life … I know at least a dozen of them who are married and have children … not all of them are like the couple in "Modern Family" … (smile)

Alexander wasn't gay?…

I'm with FierceKitty….

Armand

"… If homosexuality was so prevalent in ancient Greek society like we are lead to believe, how come there was a huge population explosion?…"

Because accepting homosexual relationships does not preclude people marrying or otherwise fathering children. I'm not aware that any academic has ever suggested that Greek culture advocated abstention from heterosexuality.

Cheers,
John

Supposed real scholars and historians are out to either make a name for themselves or their closed masonic fraternities refuse to hear someone with a true picture of history. I remember how everyone turned on British historian David Irving when some of his books were published. He talks about history being a type of freemasonry in his video searching for the truth in history. As for the more modern scholars and classicists they are some of the biggest s that I have ever seen. They all go to universities through the front door, and then come out the back end on the conveyer belt of indoctrination. And again I repeat homosexuality was never accepted in ancient Greece. Another example is Russia before 1917. Their economy under Czar Nicholas was booming, reforms were being introduced, huge surplus crops were produced, factories boomed, economically Russia was rocking and rolling but we are continuously fed Marxist tripe that the country was totally backward. The archives exist, some Russian historians have written books about this chapter of their history. Where are these western scholars? How come they don't go to Russia and do some research? Because if the Russian works were translated into English no one buy books written by crappy western historians. I always read primary sources like the time I read about about the French Revolution especially the book of the same title by British Historian Nesta Webster. Everything started to make sense.

I agree with TB on this. The idea that Ancient Greece was rampant with homosexuality is a bit far fetched. In fact, trying to apply the term homosexual redactively is misguided in my opinion. Yes, in certain circles older men would sometimes avail themselves of younger men as lovers but never as a substitute for marriage. And it should be noted that there were many disapproving voices in the ancient world around this practice. The term "porneia" described these kinds of relationships and had a generally unsavoury cultural meaning.

Spartans vs Thebans. You can see the better discipline of the Thebans in this clip. Also included is a training clip.
YouTube link

Xenophon mentions there were gay men in the Ten Thousand. He did not approve because of the "discipline" problems and barracks fights this could cause. But he is an eye witness. There was no ostracism or penalties. Although it was in foreign lands, not in the city, where old Draconian laws may have been applied to a hubristic malfeasant that was angering the body politic. Maybe Xenophon would not hire these men himself :)

TB

I've never heard Nesta Webster referred to as a historian.

"racist crackpot with Illuminati delusions" is a better description

Yeah, the sacred band's homosexuality is well-documented in Plutarch and elsewhere, no idea what the dude above is talking about. James Romm, who wrote the excellent "Ghost on the Throne" actually just published a book that goes deep into the history of the band, and I heartily recommend it.

I'd be curious to know exactly what word Xenophon used in the Anabasis for "gay men."

Bellerophon, this discussion is how the ancient Greeks understood male/male erotic relationships and how prevalent they were. It is not about modern views of homosexuality or of queer identity.

I'd be curious to know exactly what word Xenophon used in the Anabasis for "gay men."

Not my rodeo to look that up. I doubt that all the Sacred Band were sexual lovers, I'd bet that some were. Just as I would bet that some US soldiers in WW2 were gay too.

It is a focus that titillates folks, but means nothing either way. The Sacred Band was paired lovers- that can mean anything from bosum buddies to BFF to mentor to whatever.
They still beat the Spartans.

I'm happy to comment on the Greek, as an actual classicist and scholar of ancient Greek literature.

Plutarch, our main source for the Sacred Band of Thebes, who by the way are extremely marginalized in Xenophon's account of that conflict, refers to them as matched pairs of ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος, "lover" and "beloved" respectively. In Sparta, this has a mixed-age group connotation, but the SB were all adult men, and not ephebes.

Plutarch tells us they pledged to each other at a shrine to Iolaus, Hercules' lover.

The mass grave suspected to be the band at Chaeronea had many of the bodies with linked arms, signaling their devotion to each other. A monument was erected in antiquity to honor the band. In the 19th century, actually, a Victorian secret society of gay men took the name order of Chaeronea to honor the band.

Xenophon, a Thebes-hater and great fan of Spartan King Agesilaus of Sparta, is not someone to look to on this sort of thing. He even downplays the well-documented practice of pedarastic activity in Sparta in his writings.

How common were male-male relationships? (it is correct to say we shouldn't apply modern labels to these, but laughable to suggest they were not both sexual and romantic). It depends on where in Greece, and what form those relationships take is highly situational based on the polis.

I already mentioned Spartan pederasty, but it's worth mentioning that in Athens these sorts of relationships among elite men was common as well – famously Alcibiades was sexually interested in his mentor and friend Socrates, who politely turned him down.

It's not titillation to bring this up – remember, in Renaissance, Early modern, and even modern scholarship and popular conception of antiquity this sort of thing was purposefully downplayed and in some cases actively censored from translations.

Our friend upthread accused us of rewriting history, but I'd argue that shedding light on this sort of thing is actively undoing centuries of censorship.

Just as I would bet that some US soldiers in WW2 were gay too.

Actually, WWII gave opportunity for many U.S. men to (ahem) 'try new things'. So the war is generally credited as greatly expanding the U.S. gay community.

Marcus Brutus, the commenter I was replying to (TB) suggested that the ancients harshly penalized homosexual activity (untrue, as stated above) but went further and suggested that BECAUSE THEY HAD, their society lacked sexual predation like that of Epstein and Sevile.

So the modernity-antiquity comparison is not my own. But that trope that not punishing homosexuality somehow leads to pedophilia is a super common, gross attack oft-made by people who want to criminalize homosexuality, and it's really gross.

Blaming acceptance of homosexuality for our society's epidemic of powerful men (and sometimes women) abusing the innocent is an extremely harmful piece of language circulated by political actors and I genuinely think it's one of the more vile things I've seen written on this forum.

Thanks Bellerophon for your lengthy response. Did Plutarch mention ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος in his biography on Alexander? I am trying to track it down to see it in its full context. The challenge around the meaning of "eros" in ancient sources is that it is the workhorse word for "love" in the Ancient Greek world. Yes, we have other words like "philos", "storge" or even "agape" for love but "eros" is the default word and has the widest range of possible meanings. I don't think we can automatically assume that an erotic relationship in ancient Greece was necessarily sexual in nature. That automatic correlation of erotic with sexual is a modern understanding, not an ancient one.

You seem to be suggesting that male/male sexual erotic relationships were welcomed or celebrated in the ancient Greece. I don't think that is correct. There was a considerable amount of condemnation in the literature of the time against these kinds of relationship and if we look at the development of the word "porneia" it is obvious to me that they endured considerable public scorn.

Plutarch discusses this in his life of Pelopidas, not Alexander.

And as my post mentions, how male eros is received depends on the situation and the individual writer. I would never claim it was universally accepted, or universally condemned. Xenophon, for instance, makes every effort to minimize and hide Spartan pederasty, and purposefully leaves the Sacred Band out of his account of Leuctra in his Hellenika. His claims that definitely none, no sir homosexuality occurred in Sparta were debunked in the ancient world, let alone by modern scholars.

Male/male eros is not condemned universally by ancient writers, but absolutely there were some critics. Heck, some ancient writers were of two minds (Plato both praises and dislikes male/male eros). What you will find a lot of is criticism of κίναιδος, that is to say, free men playing the passive sexual partner (trying to keep this out of the R-rated realm here).

I think it's kind of silly to argue that male/male eros was not sexual. I can link you about 1,200 pieces of Attic vase art depicting a wide range of male/male sexual acts that suggests this was not the case.

If you want to read more on this, I'd highly recommend "Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Ancient Documents" which is a collection of primary sources.

Some good secondary literature would be, besides Romm's new book on the band, Davidson's "the Greeks and Greek Love". Kenneth Dover's "Greek Homosexuality" from the 70s is a hugely influential scholarly text that recently had a new edition, but it has some issues.

The Spartans did not have long hair.

As for porneia, be careful. The new testament's specific reception by Christians since the time of Paul is very different than the world of Classical Greece, and it's hard to separate the Christian meanings of the term, which essentially boils down to non-specific sexual immorality, which I might add would've seemed downright puritanical to the non-Christian Greek speakers (Paul was a bit of a jerk).

My expertise is not Biblical Greek (koine), but Attic, so I don't want to overstate things, but Demosthenes uses it to mean a free person prostituting themselves.

The Spartans absolutely did have long hair. Herodotus mentions it in Book VII of his histories; the Persians catch sight of them combing it before battle.

Let's see, then…to qualify as a friend of the family, you have to know the entire cast of every Broadway musical, have floppy wrists that can't hold a spear, subscribe to a muscleman's glossy magazine, join a Pride parade annually, and hang out in a Cambridge MCR or San Francisco bathhouse…no, the Greeks were clearly all straight.

300 men does not constitute a 'Gay' army.

It would on eBay, in fact it would probably be described as 'huge'by the vendor.

The article is obviously by a non-specialist who misuses terms like 'army'. The issue though is whether or not the Greeks had a more tolerant view of homosexuality back then than many people do now. I think the discussion here makes it pretty clear that this was in fact the case. Did this bring Western civilisation to its knees. Clearly not.

On ebay of course, that 300 Greeks might represent an army of many thousands :-)

I actually have a Leuctra-era Theban force. Complete with Sacred Band. Maybe I'll post later.

I like to see it!….

Armand

I have been doing some further reading on the subject and I am surprised by how much the case for the Sacred Band's "homosexual" identity rests on Plutarch. Without Plutarch we don't have very much at all to go on. A few allusions here and there perhaps but that seems to be it.

I am not convinced that what Plutarch is constructing is really very closely aligned to a modern understanding of homosexuality. For instance, the terms ἐραστής and ἐρώμενος could mean sexual lovers but they could also mean someone who is very devoted to another. An admirer. A band of brothers of sorts. People a deep affection for each other. Take a look at the full Liddell Scott lexicon for a wider selection of meanings.

Important to remember that these male/male relationships were not solely/exclusively/primarily sexual relationships. As one commentator suggested "they were deep and devoted friendships full of love and passion, but probably less insertive than what the modern-day gay man would expect."

I would be surprised if all or most of the 300 members of the Sacred Band were not married to women and most had children. That would be their first social obligation. A perfect example of this would be Philip II of Macedon. That they had devoted relationships to men I don't doubt. That some may have been sexual in nature I concede. We are probably looking at something closer of bi-sexual than gay in those instances.

If you consider the Pals Battalions of the early WWI British Army then that could be a parallel to the Sacred Band.
These were units made up of friends, work colleagues or some other close association, the idea being that men who were close to each other would do better when fighting.
As for the pederasty of ancient Greece, that is mentioned often enough to be commonplace and was probably similar to what happens in parts of Afghanistan today. Adult relationships though were definitely not encouraged, a man was expected to marry and provide future generations for the state, those who didn't were excluded from citizenship which included the army.