Alexander's first major campaign was at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC). Macedon fought against the combined forces of Athens and Thebes, whose greatest asset was the Sacred Band - an elite force of 150 male couples. Their inspiration came from Plato's Symposium: "an army should be made up of lovers and their loves... when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world". For forty years the Sacred Band were the preeminent fighting force of the 'civilized' world. It was ironic that Alexander and Hephaistion would take part in the battle that decimated the 'Army of Lovers'. Although surrounded and overwhelmed, the Sacred Band, lover beside lover, held their ground and fell where they stood. The writer Mary Renault takes advantage of the historical fact that neither Alexander or Hephaistion were said to have been present at a rowdy party to celebrate the victory. Instead she has them picking their way across the battlefield until... "Alexander stopped by the river bank, where Hephaistion had known he would. No one had stripped the bodies yet. The bright shields, the victor's trophies, glimmered softly under the moon. The smell of blood was stronger here; bleeding men had fought on longer." They find a young man, half in and half out of the river, a helmet filled with water by his hand. Taking the helmet, carrying the water carefully, they follow a trail of blood that links him to the greater mass of the fallen. At the end of that trail... "this man too was young... his open mouth showed a dry tongue. Alexander bent, with the water ready, and touched him, then laid the helmet aside. 'The other had stiffened, but this one is hardly cold. He had a long wait.' 'He would know why,' Hephaistion said." Hephaistion urges Alexander to go back to the celebrations. Alexander "looked around at the still shapes, the dried blood blackened by moonlight, the palely shining bronze. 'It is better here among friends'." Around 300 BC, the City of Thebes set up memorial at the burial site of the Sacred Band, a giant stone lion, which stands on its pedestal to this day.