Dr. Owen Rees

And made worse by the fact that Agesilaus intervenes.

The Spartans were going to very much punish the commander who did it.

It's that moment of, it's a rogue commander, he's done wrong, we're going to punish him, everything's fine, and Agesilaus intervenes.

And so they find him, but they didn't move the garrison.

And that seems to have his fingerprints all over it.

And that really, for me, that is where this whole thing really falls apart.

And it says a lot that Xenophon is this clear about it.

Xenophon is very pro-Spartans, the wrong, it's probably a bit of an overstep, but you know, he very much massages, especially Agesilaus, what Agesilaus is doing.

This is one of the closest moments we get in all of his accounts of Agesilaus, which includes a eulogistic biography of him.

It's the closest we get to him openly criticising Agesilaus.

All biases aside, all relationships aside, this was completely immoral, unethical, wrong, should not have happened, and everything that occurs after that, dare I say, was coming to him.

Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

And what really comes across is the regular raiding that does occur is achieving nothing, like we're all saying.

So you've got that kind of demoralizing reality of we don't have the power to put them back in their box.

To the point where we see Sparta very much sort of stops leaving as much as it had its own lands.

So very much you see the amount of military activity very much begins to wane.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, it's why I brought up the internal problems they're dealing with.

Because one of the other reasons why Sparta is struggling to maintain its momentum during these decades is it can't sustain it from home all the way out to, well, originally Asia Minor, but now we're only talking Central Greece.

It cannot maintain that momentum.

Thebes very much goes through, with the reassertion of its control of the city, we see innovative change, shall we say.