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Old 10-26-2009, 03:41 AM   #5
Urbane Guerrilla
Person who doesn't update the user title
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
Quote:
Originally Posted by joelnwil View Post
I believe it is in Plato's Symposium where he says that a soldier will fight better if his lover is at his side, because he will not want to seem cowardly in front of his lover.
Thebes tried it, in several tactical methods in the classical hoplite organization -- the Sacred Band of Thebes, a hoplite unit of a strength of a few hundred that for forty years swept all before them before finally getting ground up, one hundred percent casualties, at Chaeronaea, 338 BC. Took Alexander (not quite yet the Great), the innovation of a pike phalanx, and Philip of Macedon to do the job.

What they had to say about it, at their beginning, translated by Dryden.

And the end of the Sacred Band
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Last edited by Urbane Guerrilla; 10-26-2009 at 03:49 AM.
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