Sacred!

This is coolbert:

Indeed, most surprisingly so, the accounts and histories of the ancients are to be more preferred with regard to truthfulness and veracity when compared to the learned and scholarly "works" of the modern military historian?

Can this be so?

I am particularly thinking of Plutarch and his "Life of Pelopidas"! Describing the battlefield in the aftermath of Chaeronea [338 B.C.] that number of the Sacred Band of Thebes found slain vanquished in battle carefully enumerated with an exactness only many thousands of years later confirmed by an archaeological dig.

That Sacred Band of Thebes the most elite soldiers of the Theban city-state, devoted to one another, a shock troop battalion that could always be counted on in combat, having a code of honor that did not allow for retreat on the battlefield, defeated by the Macedonian army of Philip, every last man a casualty, killed or captured.

"Sacred Band of Thebes - - The Sacred Band of Thebes . . . was a troop of picked soldiers, consisting of 150 male couples which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC. . . . It was annihilated by Philip II of Macedon in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC."

[in the ancient world there were two major cities named Thebes and not to be confused. One in Egypt and one in Greece. NOT one and the same!]

The Sacred Band three hundred men strong, standing their ground to the last, receiving proper burial with due honor, not stripped of armor and weaponry as was the normal case.

That mass grave containing the bodies of the Sacred Band, when exhumed, found to contain the remains and armor of those killed at Chaeronea, the total number of those buried very closely in accord with the account of Plutarch!

"Although Plutarch claims that all three hundred of the Band's warriors died that day, excavation of the burial site at the Lion Monument in 1890 turned up 254 skeletons, arranged in seven rows."

"it was only in 1881 that the archaeologist’s spade revealed it to modern eyes, a physical proof of the ancients’ accounts . . . there lay still the neatly arranged graves . . . [with] the shields of the Sacred Band, each inscribed with the name of the bearer . . . Not only do these shields identify their owners as Theban soldiers, but from this derives conclusive archaeological corroboration of the account of Plutarch."

Plutarch not 100 % correct but in large measure so, his history having been confirmed by modern archaeology! The example of the Sacred Band is just one many from ancient times many more existing "archaeological corroboration" only needed!

coolbert.