When Elon Musk announced that he was launching a new political party to punish the Republicans at next year’s mid-term elections, he mentioned a Greek general from the 4th Century BC.
“The way we’re going to crack the uniparty system is by using a variant of how Epaminondas shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra: Extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday.
Who was Epaminondas?
Born around 420BC, Epaminondas lived at a time when his city of Thebes had been reduced to a client state of Sparta after being defeated in the Corinthian War.
Under its terms of surrender, Thebes was obliged to fight alongside Sparta whenever called upon.
Thebes was an oligarchy, but many of its young men wished to overthrow these ruling families and their Spartan overlords.
Chief among these was Epaminondas, one of history’s greatest military tacticians, and an instrumental figure in the founding of the Sacred Band of Thebes – an elite fighting force exclusively made up of homosexual couples.
Following a successful revolt against Thebes’ oligarchs in 379BC, Epaminondas knew that Spartan retaliation was inevitable.
The advantage that Sparta had over other Greek city states was its full time military elite that did not need to work to sustain itself.
A depiction of a male same-sex couple on a Greek cup dated around 450BC. Photo : Louvre Museum/Wikipedia CCCreating the Sacred Band
Having fought alongside Spartans, Epaminondas saw the need for Thebes to create its own military elite that could stand toe-to-toe with Sparta on the battlefield.
And so he called forth men in same-sex relationships from Thebes’ warriors and began training them full time, with their living expenses paid by the city.
This band of 150 male couples made sacred oaths of love and loyalty to each other, so they were called the Sacred Band of Thebes.
Epaminondas knew that Thebes would be outnumbered by the Spartans and their allies and so he needed a plan to take the wind out of them.
A military disruptor
Until this point in Greek history, battles had been fought the same way for hundreds of years.
Both armies would divide their men equally into opposing phalanxes. The men at the front would form a shield wall and the men behind them would push their spears through and when the two armies clashed it would become a deadly scrum until one side broke through and routed the other.
It was Spartan custom to concentrate their own fighters in their right most phalanx, with the other phalanxes made up of their more numerous allies.
Knowing what the Spartans would expect, Epaminondas divided his men into three shallow decoy phalanxes and one very deep long phalanx, at the left of which he placed the Sacred Band.
The Sacred Band were deployed as the shock troops of the Theban army. Image: United States Military Academy/ Wikipedia CCLooking across the battlefield when the two armies met at Leuctra in 371 BC the Spartan king Cleombrotus only saw the front ranks of Thebes’ phalanxes and so did not divert men from his other phalanxes to oppose this lopsided assault.
When the battle began, Epaminondas charged this huge phalanx into the Spartan phalanx, crashing through their ranks. The Sacred Band then cut down the fleeing Spartans.
Seeing the Spartans crushed for the first time, their allies quit the battle before even exchanging blows with Epaminondas’ decoy phalanxes.
As a result, the Thebans instantly became the most powerful city state in Greece and remained so until Thebes and its Sacred Band were finally crushed by Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great at the battle of Chaeronea in 338BC.
The end of the Sacred Band
As men without wives and children, it was believed these pairs of lovers would fight to the death to defend each other when other men might flee the battlefield, and this ultimately proved to be the case.
Following the battle, Philip II raised a monument to the bravery of the Sacred Band of Thebes, and when this mass grave was excavated in the 19th Century, archeologists discovered 127 pairs of male skeletons.
Epaminondas had died, childless and unmarried, years earlier in 362BC at the Battle of Mantinea, along with his lovers and anointed successors Iolaidas and Daiphantus, but at Mantinea he achieved the ultimate victory for the Thebans.
Elon’s plan
The homosexuality of Epaminondas and the Sacred Band of Thebes is most likely completely coincidental to Musk’s plans to punish the Republican Party. He probably isn’t even aware of it.
But invoking Epaminondas suggests that he will aim to take out Republicans in key seats so that they will lose their majority in Congress in order to weaken the party as it heads towards the next US Presidential Election.
Whether Musk’s “America Party” will actually win any seats, or simply deliver seats to the Democrats by splitting the vote in Republican held seats, remains to be seen.
But it’s a nice excuse for us to revisit this often forgotten story from the ancient world.
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