Were the greeks cute twinks? @Miffin and @GigaNew2024Account have a 20+ comment long slapfight about it, featuring many a longpost.

>When did I do this?

Oh, I think I get it. You mean, when you quoted a secondary source that I am well aware of, as if Leitao is some unimpeachable authority? That I didn't even deny revisionary thought exists re. Sacred Band? This secondary source that, let me paraphrase what you said as a figure of speech, is "googled shit[sic] that agrees with you"? Unlike my literal primary sources? Lol there are plenty of articles which state otherwise, and which disagree with eg. Leitao.

OK, here's a secondary source that disagrees with you (but again, I didn't even take a strong position on this, I just wanted to show it is quite reasonable to conclude re. the Sacred Band, and it's absurd to deny any kind of military homosexual practice in classical Greece):

The Thespians played a memorable military role at Thermopylae in 480, and male-on-male eros was to be most conspicuously enacted by the celebrated Theban Sacred Band of warriors in the fourth century.

A quite remarkable military innovation of this new Thebes was its 'Sacred Band' (hieros lochos). This was not the first elite, specialist troop to be raised in Greek history. Argos, for example, had anticipated Thebes in the late fifth century, and there is perhaps even a slight anticipatory hint in Herodotus, in the Theban '300' he referred to in the context of the battle of Plataea (Histories, 9.67). Even for Thebes, however, the Sacred Band was an unusual, and for Greece an unprecedented, social formation. The city was especially renowned – or, according to taste, excoriated – for its alleged (in myth) 'invention' of the partly pedagogic, partly social-bonding, partly sexual-emotional, social practice of pederasty (paiderastia), and for its actual, historical practice of male–male homosexuality. Paiderastia must be sharply distinguished from our 'pederasty'. It denoted... [NB: snipping this out because you now have to cope how pederasty wasn't paedophilic when it basically kind of was, at least in part]

Unlike in a Spartan pederastic relationship, such as that between Lysander and Agesilaus half a century earlier, both partners to the 150 pairing relationships that constituted the 300-strong Sacred Band of Thebes were, as noted, adult citizens; though it may be that there was a hierarchy of seniority within each and every pair – if for example the older of the couple was married and the younger was not. [NB: yes, probably, and as an extension of the Theban pederastic practice, and a continuation of the relationship, which already had various militaristic rituals- this is why it's an exception. To be clear, willy-nilly adult homosexuality wasn't exactly acceptable in classical Greece.]

-Cartledge, Paul. (2020). Thebes- The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

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