The king sent his youngest brother, the thirteen-year-old Philip. Spending three years in Thebes, Philip was taught a lifestyle of vegetarianism, celibacy and pacifism (all of which he later ignored), but he stayed in the house of the Theban general who was his mentor, probably also his lover, and studied the tactics of the Sacred Band, the elite corps of 300 (supposedly 150 male couples) whose victories had won Thebes its supremacy.
