Dr. Owen Rees

And this is often assigned to individuals.

So one of those individuals is Epaminondas, the great military commander.

We also get Pelopidas and his creation of the sacred band.

The fronting of it at this point.

The narrative is often that Thebes is basically having a revolution, a military revolution.

This, I think, is probably overstated quite a lot.

Rule has written on this a lot, but I'm going to talk for now.

I suppose the big thing for me is what Thebes is doing is filling a void that Sparta has created by its inability to sustain itself.

So what Thebes does is, I suppose the easiest way, and I think it's something you've said to before, Raoul, is...

Thebes catches up, basically, with what made Sparta so dominant on land during the previous century.

Thebes has matched it.

Not necessarily surpassed it, but just matched it in terms of having a crack force that is capable of following orders.

Yeah, absolutely.

And whilst we talk about Thebes, one of the other areas of conflict here is Thebes is very much the head of its league, the Boeotian League.

So when we're talking about Thebes and the Theban army, much like when we talk about the Spartan army, we're talking about them and their allies and those around them.

So yeah, Thebes has very much, it is in its ascendancy now at this point, very much filling the void that Spartan inaction is beginning to create.

Probably chuckling to themselves.

You do wonder how much of it is an attempt to explain the exceptional.

So when you build a narrative of Spartan invincibility in your source material, in your writing and things like that, and then as we're going to get to Eleutra, they are defeated.

How do you explain that defeat?