The Sacred Band

Available from Nook & Cranny Books when we last checked. Sold from the shop’s own store; the price there is the one that counts.

From classicist James Romm comes a “striking…fascinating” ( Booklist ) deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes—and the saga of the greatest military corps of the time, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers. The story of the Sacred Band, an elite 300-man corps recruited from pairs of lovers, highlights a chaotic era of ancient Greek history, four decades marked by battles, ideological disputes