Edit: in case it wasn't clear, THIS IS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE.

 

You've hit on a real controversy! While no one doubts that the Thebans won a stunning victory at Leuktra in 371 BC, it's actually quite difficult to work out from the surviving sources how they did it. One of the trickiest elements in the story is, in fact, the Theban unit of 300 picked hoplites known as the Sacred Band. We know they were there, but what role were they meant to play in the Theban general Epameinondas' tactical plan, and how did they carry it out? Thankfully, some recent research has shed some new light on the issue.

Our main problem is that only one of the surviving accounts of the battle - the one in Plutarch's Life of Pelopidas 23 - actually mentions the Sacred Band by name. So when we want to figure out what the Sacred Band did at Leuktra, we have to rely on Plutarch, who wrote more than 500 years after the event. What makes the job even harder is that his account of the battle is not particularly detailed. He says simply that the Theban phalanx advanced against the Spartan right wing; the Spartans tried to react by extending their wing to try and surround the Thebans, but then suddenly the Sacred Band charged out and interrupted their manoeuvre. The ensuing confusion in the Spartan lines made their defeat inevitable.

This sketch raises an obvious question: at the moment of their decisive charge, where did the Sacred Band come from?

There have been many suggestions, all equally controversial. None of the common reconstructions is supported by what Plutarch actually says, since he doesn't actually explain how the Theban army was drawn up. The best we can tell from Plutarch is that the Sacred Band appeared, as if out of nowhere, to crash into the unsuspecting Spartans.

The debate was advanced recently by the suggestion that Plutarch's sources were telling the exact truth: the Sacred Band literally materialised in the middle of the battle, and no one could explain how it happened. An edited volume dedicated to the problem has offered a number of tempting suggestions.^1

Intriguing but not very plausible is the suggestion that the Sacred Band happened to be in the area on other business and noticed a battle unfolding. They proceeded to get involved on what they hoped was their side, though there was a good deal of dust and the deployments were already a bit confusing. Their unexpected support tipped the balance in Thebes' favour and cemented the name of Epameinondas as an almost supernaturally lucky commander.^2

The solution offered by M. Olmo is built on parallels like Thermopylai. Rather than supposing that the Sacred Band was placed anywhere in the line over against the Spartans, he suggests they may have stayed under cover and reconstructs a possible route for them to quietly position themselves in the Spartan rear. When the Theban phalanx attacked in front, the Sacred Band came from behind.^3

A more radical alternative is the notion that the Sacred Band were visitors from another place who arrived onto the battlefield through some portal, though it raises some questions yet to be answered by science. This explanation makes sense of Plutarch's account while also explaining the oddness of a unit like the Sacred Band in its Greek context: a unit of 150 pairs of homosexual lovers trained for war is somewhat puzzling, since training for war was not something the Greeks generally did.^4

Historians of religion have posited that Greek myths may offer the answer. The Athenians famously boasted that they alone, of all the Greeks, were autochthonous - they had been born from their own soil, their first ancestors literally rising from the ground to populate Athens. And many other divine beings lived beneath the Earth. If we regard the Sacred Band as a literally sacred band of chthonic gods, emerging from below at the time of Thebes' greatest peril, it is easy to see why their arrival in battle went unexplained. Who could have thought that the field itself would spit out fresh enemies for the Spartans to fight?^5

For me personally, though, the most likely explanation is the one offered by the editors. There are plenty of historical examples of well-prepared and battle-ready forces being completely overwhelmed by troops that seemed to materialise out of nowhere: we might think of the Belgian defenders of the fortress Eben Emaël in 1940, or the Germans who thought their Atlantikwall made them safe from attack. In each case, the unexpected attack actually came from above. The sudden appearance of the Sacred Band at Leuktra can be explained in a similar way. The Sacred Band, in short, were almost certainly paratroopers - a trained elite ready to be dropped into battle at the critical point. The Spartans, with their plumed helmets on their heads and their eyes focused on the Thebans in front of them, would never have seen them coming.^6 The Airborne Sacred Band remained a trump card of the Theban army for decades, until the unit fell to its doom at the battle of Chaironeia, dropped straight on top of the forest of Macedonian sarisa pikes.

 

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1. A. Brambilla/R. Konijnendijk (eds.), New Approaches to the Sacred Band at Leuctra (Rome, 2018).

2. O. Lord, 'The Sacred Band and Divine Intervention', New Approaches 27-59.

3. M. Olmo, 'Greek Tactics and the Fatal Thrust', New Approaches 180-203.

4. H. Dash-Hyphen, 'Time Travel or Lateral Travel? The Sacred Band as Outsiders', New Approaches 60-80.

5. S. Task, 'The Rise of the Sacred Band: Underworld Gods and the Field of Battle', New Approaches 144-165.

6. Brambilla/Konijnendijk, 'The Airborne Sacred Band', New Approaches 223-250.