Review: Intersectional Humanities Screening of Army of Lovers

Review: Intersectional Humanities Screening of

Army of Lovers: The Sacred Band of Thebes 

Tuesday 11th November 2025

Hannah Apen

This documentary film, directed by Lefteris Charitos, explores the Sacred Band of Thebes, an army in Ancient Greece made up of 150 pairs of male lovers. Using a combination of animation, live-action film, and interviews with experts, including archaeologists and historians, the film documents the rise and fall of the Sacred Band. The film also explores the 19^th-century archaeological discovery and excavation of a mass grave where the bodies of almost all of the ‘lovers’ lay, killed in the Battle of Chaeronea, in which the Band of Thebes was brutally defeated by the Macedonian army, led by Phillip II and his son, Alexander the Great. 

The film recounts the uniqueness of a military unit composed in this way, although homosexual practice between men was not unusual in Ancient Greece (Dover, 1989),  and notes that eros (erotic love) was used to the tactical advantage of the army, motivating the band to protect one another and act in solidarity with their partners.  The narrative suggests that the care fomented between the soldiers in the Band of Thebes because of their intimate relationships with one another provided a stronger basis for their mutual protection of the band’s comrades. This gave the army a tactical advantage, supposedly as a result of their stronger desire to persevere through the fear-inducing, volatile context of armed combat.

One thing this film does well is to inspire a level of empathy between the spectator and the ancient Thebans. It is often easy to view history in a way that removes the humanity from historical narratives, without consideration for the real people that were affected by events that took place in the past. This, I believe, is particularly true of ancient history, given the temporal distance between us and ancient subjects, which arguably adds to their being seen as other in relation to ourselves. It can be difficult to empathise with those people that we see as so different from ourselves, from another space and time entirely. However, this film makes a concerted effort to portray the Band of Thebes as constituted by subjects, persons with interests, emotions, and desires. The slaughter of the Thebans during the invasion of their citadel is shown as a tragedy, and the spectator is invited to connect emotionally with the loss of these hundreds of men. 

I feel that the film perhaps takes too many creative liberties in its retelling of this history. Firstly, whilst the accounts given by the various historians that the film interacts with are not necessarily inaccurate  and do represent widely accepted versions of events (Flynn, 2021; Fulton, 2020; Compton, 1994), the spectator is not made aware of the limitations of the historical materials available to researchers and thus is fed these opinions as if they were entirely historically accurate and truthful. It is important to recognise that, given the lack of contemporary archival material, much of what is known about the Theban Army, especially about the Sacred Band of Thebes, is a best guess based on bringing together various literary works spanning a centuries-long period (Fulton, 2022; Leitao, 2002). The very existence of the Sacred Band, even, has been brought into question, and more widely the conclusion that the skeletons found in the 19^th-century archaeological dig belonged to the ‘army of lovers’ has been disputed (Fulton, 2022; Leitao, 2019).

Secondly, I am hesitant to subscribe to the pop-history notion of the ‘army of lovers’. The connotations of this label risk the imposition of modern-day norms of homosexuality onto an historical context in which such norms would have been totally alien. Conceptions of homosexuality in Ancient Greece were vastly different from those of the contemporary period, involving norms of pederasty,  power and seniority in homosexual practice, and ideas of mentorship and the teaching of masculinity through homosexual relations (Hubbard, 2020; Brinkhof, 2023; Zervoulis, 2016). Homosexual relations, in stark contrast to how homosexual relationships are in the modern day, were arguably not rooted in romantic attachment, mutual love, care, and affection, and there is evidence to suggest that, again, unlike today, entering into a life-long homosexual partnership was not accepted as a valid option for adult men (Cohen, 2011; Dover, 1989). I would go as far as to argue that to draw parallels between homosexual relationships of the sort common in Ancient Greece and homosexual love as we know it today is to do a disservice to modern gay relationships, and runs the risk of perpetuating harmful and inaccurate stereotypes about the sorts of sexual and romantic attraction that gay men experience. This is not to say that it is impossible that the Band of Thebes contained pairs of men with both physical and emotional bonds between them. However I question the narrative that these bonds represented homosexual love in the way that we understand this today, and relatedly I challenge the idea that these relationships can be appropriately compared to the experience of gay people in modern times for liberatory ends. I do not think that we can reasonably draw the link between the pederastic, mentoring, and/or power-play-esque relations between men in Ancient Thebes, and queer love in the 21st century, although the documentary alludes to this possibility. It is important to understand that the principal aim of these sorts of documentary films is to provide digestible historical information to a non-expert audience, and in this way, I would say that this piece largely succeeds in its mission. However, from an academic perspective, I argue that there are important shortcomings in the film’s approach to history. 

            Overall, I thought that Army of Lovers made for an interesting watch, and I found that its approach to ancient history was pleasantly accessible. Although I felt that the historicity lacked a degree of critical analysis that risked misleading audiences and overstating the contemporary importance of the ‘army of lovers’ in relation to modern day homosexuality, I also recognise that this sort of historical analysis is difficult to conduct and include within the sort of documentary film that is accessible to a non-academic audience. I do, however, believe that encouraging a general public to think critically about historical sources is important, and this could have been better incorporated within the scope of the production. 

Works Cited

Brinkhof, Tim. ‘How the Ancient Greeks Viewed Pederasty and Homosexuality’. The Past, 13 January 2023.

Charitos, Lefteris. Army of Lovers: The Sacred Band of Thebes. Anemon Productions, 2025.

Cohen, David. ‘Chapter 7 – Law, Social Control, and Homosexuality in Classical Athens’. In Law, Sexuality, and Society. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Compton, Louis. ‘“An Army of Lovers” – The Sacred Band of Thebes’. History Today, 1994.

Dover, Kenneth James. Greek Homosexuality. Harvard University Press, 1989.

Flynn, James. ‘Lovers and Soldiers – The Sacred Band of Thebes’. Humanities, 2021.

Fulton, Tobias J. ‘The Sacred Band of Thebes’. Hellenic Museum, 25 May 2022.

Hubbard, Thomas K. ‘Historical Views of Homosexuality: Ancient Greece’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 29 May 2020.

Leitao, David. ‘The Legend of the Sacred Band’. In The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Zervoulis, Karyofyllis. ‘The Greek Context in Relation to Homosexuality, Homophobia and Gay Identity and Community’. Psychology of Sexualities Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2016, 15-28.