Dr. Owen Rees

And, well, he dies.

So I think it's fair to say he's defeated.

Yeah.

So for me, I very much follow Xenophon here.

So one of the things I love about Xenophon's histories is he quite categorically ends it.

Thucydides famously doesn't have an ending to his histories that we have, but Xenophon's very much like Battle of Mantinea.

That's it.

Someone else can take this up now.

If they want to write another history, they can continue.

To him, this was a watershed moment.

And I very much see that in similar lines as this brought an end to

sort of 150 years of how the Greek world thought it worked, I suppose, pretty much every illusion there, including Thebes is going to fill that void, was very much smashed that moment.

And that's why I think Xenophon has that as his point of departure.

And yes, Sparta continues and tries to assert itself.

We then get the reassertion 100 years later, trying to reestablish itself and things like that.

But the Sparta that we talk about, the Sparta of the descendants of Leonidas and all those kind of traditions, for me, 362, gone.

Come back to my argument there, Tristan.

I'll be honest with you, I often dismiss it as trying to explain through the Greeks how the Macedonians were able to rise up.

Because it's not that the Macedonians are superior.

It's that they learned from the Greek greatness and implemented the right lessons of the genius that is Epaminondas.