The Lion of the lovers
They were 300 warriors, divided into 150 pairs of lovers, and were considered invincible. Their story was almost forgotten until a British architect literally stumbled over it on a ride in 1818.
On 3 June 1818, while riding through the Greek countryside near Chaeronea, the British architect George Ledwell Taylor discovered a piece of marble sticking out of the ground. When he and his companions began to dig with the help of local farmers, the huge head of a stone lion came to light. Taylor immediately realised that he had come across the monument mentioned by the ancient author Pausanias in his writings: the Lion of Chaeronea, erected in honour of the Sacred Band of Thebes.
The Sacred Band was an elite unit of the Theban army consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers, 300 warriors in all. The idea behind it was as simple as it was bold: a man fights more bravely when he stands beside his beloved and wants to protect him. The unit was founded around 378 BC and proved almost invincible. At the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, it defeated the previously dominant Spartan army and ended Sparta's supremacy over Greece.
Its end came in 338 BC at the Battle of Chaeronea, when Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander, later to be known as Alexander the Great, crushed an alliance of Greek cities. The Sacred Band stood against the attack and was completely wiped out. Not a single man fled. Plutarch reports that Philip II burst into tears at the sight of the 300 fallen warriors, all with wounds to the chest.
Beneath the lion, which was restored in 1902 after its rediscovery, archaeologists found 254 skeletons arranged in seven rows, which strikingly confirms the ancient accounts.