User:Palairet

1 Hammond & Griffith, History of Macedonia, II, pp. 598-9, 610 2 Herodotus, VII, 225 and n.1. (Rawlinson’s annotation). Athens and Thebes probably underrated Philip II’s Macedonian army after the debacle it had suffered at Byzantium and Perinthus. They confronted him at the hard-fought key battle of Chaeronea, in Boeotia, at which about 60,000 soldiers clashed. The Macedonians marched into Thebes, which Philip put under occupation. The stone Lion of Chaeronia stands close to the road-side. It was probably built by the Thebans as a memorial to the “Sacred Band”, their elite troops, homosexual lovers, all 300 of whom fought Alexander’s cavalry to the death. Philip forced the Thebans to pay ransom for their bodies. The lion mounts guard over their common grave. (1) A century and a half earlier, a stone lion had been erected at Thermopylae, after the battle against the Persians, to commemorate Leonidas and his 300 Spartan heroes, (also homosexual) so it seems likely that the Thermopylae memorial inspired erection of the lion commemorating the 300 Theban heroes at Chaeronia. The Thermopylae lion was still standing in the First Century A.D., but some time later it disappeared. (2) I would suggest that this former lion of Thermopylae was to re-emerge as the Lion of Amphipolis. The history of this monument, which is similar in appearance to the Lion of Chaeronia, is not known: its plinth was discovered near Amphipolis in the mouth of River Struma during the Balkan Wars. The river was later dredged to recover the rest of the statue, which was re-assembled and re-erected in 1936. It has been assumed that the Amphipolis lion was a Macedonian symbol, but the difficulty is that the Chaeronia lion, on which it is thought to have been modelled, was built to commemorate men who fell in fighting against Macedonia. A much more likely explanation is that the lion at Thermopylae was consigned from its original location by sea at an unknown date and reached the mouth of the Struma, where the ship carrying it sank. Maybe the ship was unloading there but it was more likely en route for an unknown destination, making the lion’s association with Amphipolis completely accidental. (If this is so, then the Amphipolis lion is the early Fifth Century original, the lion of Chaeronia a Fourth Century copy.) Logically, the lion ought to be taken back to Thermopylae.