A day after Independence Day in the United States, the world’s richest man announced on X that he would form a new political party called the America Party. A follow-up from Elon Musk revealed that he intended to break up the current “uniparty” system through the use of an Ancient Greek military tactic, “a variant of how Epaminondas shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra: extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.” The wording was vague, but it followed Musk’s performative pattern of invoking the Greco-Roman world. From his references to ancient leaders like the Roman dictator Sulla to tweets in Latin without an English translation, Musk frequently draws on the ancient world as a way of telegraphing a conservative intellect. And yet, the technocrat’s reference to Epaminondas makes one wonder whether he may have missed the irony of alluding to a battle wherein it was queer soldiers who helped achieve victory.Since the 19th century, the famed Theban military unit known as the Sacred Band has been an icon for gay rights. In the fourth century BCE, Epaminondas of Samos was a general for the city of Thebes in the central Greek region of Boeotia. By 371 BCE, he became a Boeotarch, one of the leading Boeotian federal officials in the newly established democracy. As a diplomat, he attempted to broker peace with the bellicose Spartans to the south, but ultimately, Boeotia and Sparta clashed at the Battle of Leuctra that same year. During the battle, the Thebans famously deployed the Sacred Band of Thebes to help clinch victory. The elite unit of 300 foot soldiers from the city, originally formed around 379 BCE, consisted of pairs of lover-warriors who marched into battle together. At the battle of Leuctra, the one that Musk referenced, they were led by a famed general named Pelopidas. The strength of the unit emanated in part from their deep attachment to each other. The Thebans were not the only Greek culture to use this approach: There was same-sex love in a number of Greek military units beyond the Sacred Band, from Achilles’ and Patroclus’ likely relationship in the Trojan War to the use of same-sex couples paired together in battlelines for the Greek city of Elis. Musk and many other conservatives, like Steve Bannon, often omit the role of sexuality in ancient military successes when extolling the virtues of Greek warriors. Elon Musk’s recent posts on X (screenshots Hyperallergic)But why did Thebes promote same-sex love explicitly? James Romm, the leading expert on the unit and author of The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom (2021), told me that the strength of the Sacred Band “came from the determination of lovers to excel in the eyes of their partners and to protect their partners from harm.” The Thebans encouraged relationships between male soldiers to use love as a means of cementing military protection. One of the founders of the Sacred Band allegedly remarked that “the only general that can never be beaten is Eros,” Romm said, suggesting that “romantic love is the strongest motivation that could be harnessed on the battlefield.” In other words, bravery in battle could be encouraged through both love of one’s homeland and love for one’s boyfriend. If Musk is aware of how much the Battle of Leuctra relied on the Sacred Band — and thus people we would today identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community — he did not signal it, and his recent track record has shown that he continues not to be an ally to the community. The scion frequently donates to politicians hostile to LGBTQ+ rights both here and abroad and has allowed hateful and abusive speech on X since his acquisition of the social media site in 2022, mocked pronouns, and tweeted transphobic messages against trans persons, including his own daughter. Musk’s allusion to Thebes might be a tacit jab at his rival, Steve Bannon, who frequently expresses his adoration for the Spartans and the Peloponnesian War. Thebes is well known for the Sacred Band, but it is also famous for being the power that finally toppled the Spartans. Following Musk’s announcement of a third party, Bannon took the bait and attacked Musk on the “War Room” podcast by calling him a buffoon and a mook. Whether the references to Thebes were an implicit jab at Bannon’s love of Sparta or not, Musk often engages in pseudo-intellectual but misguided flexes that cast him as a savant and erudite nerd. And yet the technocrat is well-known to misunderstand the meaning and context of the literature he claims to read. Detail from an attic black-figure neck amphora with soldier scene from the Iliad (ca. 540–520 BCE) (image via Wikimedia Commons)Musk’s references to antiquity often seem to be more about cherry-picking than misconstruing, and his AI is only perpetuating this selective bias. He trained his “un-woke” AI bot, Grok, on texts that turned it into a Nazi. This process of using selective texts for AI training creates an echo chamber of omission and prejudice. Conservative focus on military might over queerness would, to my mind, most likely result in the existence of historical queerness being more frequently omitted or occluded if AI is trained only on right-wing media. AI simply mimics, perpetuates, and then attempts to normalize the biases of the texts it is built upon. In his performative mentions of the Greco-Roman world, Musk leans heavily on the prestige of the classical “tradition,” a constructed notion often celebrated in conservative circles. This affection for “classics” is embodied in initiatives like the Christian-backed, conservative alternative to the SAT and ACT, the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which purports to draw on “classic texts,” from Aristotle to Shakespeare, to combat “wokeness.” But there are glaring omissions once again: The list of ancient texts for the CLT excludes the work of the lesbian poet Sappho, along with any analysis of the prevalence and acceptance of same-sex love in antiquity. This May, Republican Senator Jim Banks introduced a bill to promote the CLT at military academies and federally operated schools. The bill, which has not passed the Senate but has been referred to the Committee on Armed Services, would encourage the use of the CLT at institutions like West Point and the Naval Academy, further enmeshing the teaching of antiquity and the concept of military valor. Achilles sits next to Patroclus as he surrenders Briseis, his hostage concubine, in a fresco from Pompeii from the 1st century CE (photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)Like the CLT, the curation of Greco-Roman antiquity filtered through movies, pop culture, and books often downplays or omits the queerness throughout the Ancient Greek world. In the movie Troy (2004), there are no homoerotic elements to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus (they were cousins!), while there was backlash to Netflix’s Troy: Fall of a City (2018) due to the use of a Black actor as Achilles, as well as the steamy threesome between Achilles, Patroclus, and Briseis. The sanitized, straight version of antiquity often presented to the public omits the long history of gay and trans figures throughout the premodern Mediterranean, deletions or modifications that authors like Roland Betancourt, Madeline Miller, and Sarah Nooter have sought to return to the ancient world. In Nooter’s new How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality, the University of Chicago Classics professor uses snippets from dozens of ancient authors to underscore “what the Greeks knew long ago — that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration.”What is the ultimate damage of a classical tradition that LGBTQ+ people are excised from? “Tradition” can serve as a means of reinforcing a conservative construction of masculinity. Powerful men like Musk or Mark Zuckerberg often reference the ancient leaders of the past as examples of their preferred type of right-wing masculinity: straight. But Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill put it eloquently when he noted that references to Greco-Roman antiquity are often more about presenting oneself as the culmination of a tradition than presenting an accurate vision of that past. Such tradition deploys a “historically privileged continuity: a line, an ancestry, a promise.” Like Musk himself, the invocations of these traditions are often self-serving. The Sacred Band came to an end in 338 BCE at the Battle of Chaeronea, after Philip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander, and their troops triumphed over Thebes. Plutarch notes the awe with which Philip looked at the fallen members of the Sacred Band on the battlefield thereafter. In 1880, nearly 300 skeletons were discovered in a mass burial beneath the soil. As Romm argues, this is likely the final resting place of the Sacred Band of Thebes. A Roman-era mosaic from the Poseidon Villa in Zeugma, Turkey, depicting Achilles disguised as a woman and Odysseus tricking him into revealing himself (image via Wikimedia Commons)From the late 19th century onward, the Sacred Band and their burial at Chaeronea served as an artistic touchstone for gay artists and organizers. Not long after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 shook gay communities in Europe and abroad, the poet, writer, and gay activist George Cecil Ives proposed to begin an underground group called the Order of Chaeronea, one of the earliest known gay rights societies. They had rings made for their group and banded together to fight legislation prohibiting homosexuality, among many other causes. Later, queer illustrators and writers like Laurence Housman (brother of classicist and poet A.E. Housman) joined Ives and the order, eventually co-founding another gay rights group, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. From 1909 on, Housman also played a pivotal part in organizing men to support women’s suffrage and creating the artist workshop known as the Suffrage Atelier. Ancient Greece was a touchstone for these early activists. In The Sacred Band, Romm notes that Ives called members of the Order of Chaeronea “Hellenists.” This was “his term for those who found inspiration in Greek male erôs [love].” To gay communities of the past and present, the Battle of Leuctra and the Sacred Band represent much more than just a military tactic. And the lessons that the military unit provides continue to this day. As Romm remarks, because male homosexuality is frequently connected “with softness or effeminacy,” gay and trans persons are often slandered as embodying qualities in opposition to military prowess. However, “the Sacred Band, and the Greeks generally,” Romm argues, “demonstrate the opposite case.” For many activists from Victorian England to today, this unit exemplifies the abilities of queer soldiers who drew on their love of one another as an undeniable strength. If Musk had known even a fraction of this history of the Sacred Band, he perhaps would have realized that his plans for a new political party are rather magnificently “woke” indeed.