[Stick]

I'm kinda a trivia junky so when it comes to Christmas or birthday I'm an easy "buy for" kinda guy and this last Christmas I got about ten books of trivia, the most intriguing being "The Greatest WAR Stories Never Told, written by Rick Beyer.

The very first section of the book tells about the notorious Spartan Army of ancient Greece and how they were defeated once. A Spartan boy was taken from his family at the age of just seven and put into a military school and every Spartan Man over twenty years old had to serve in the Army of Sparta hence the creation of the most powerful Greecian Army which went on to defeat the entire Greecian peninsula. Sparta had aspirations of ruling all of the Mediterranean coast and coastal nations.

In 371 B.C. the Spartans were battling the Thebes in Leuctra and the elite "Sacred Band" of Thebes beat the Spartans shamelessly.

The Sacred Band only had 300 soldiers but they were soldiers with a secret too. It seems that there were 150 pairs of Sacred Bandsmen and you guessed it, they were loving couples, they were gay. They were a "band of lovers" with a huge degree of unity. The Spartans got it in the end.

Ain't trivia wonderful? Especially historic military trivia.