Dr. Owen Rees

He's just such a more interesting reader.

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.

And as a result, he gives just an amazing level of insight into things, especially when he's witnessed them himself.

And you really do, when you're reading someone like Xenophon, you get moments you're like, you were clearly there.

This is a bit too vivid.

Even the speeches of Lysias,

You know, for individual Athenian citizens who fought in many of the wars we're going to talk about, fought in many of the battles we talked about, just gives you that kind of the human side of these sort of stories as well.

But on top of that, we also can't forget this.

The fourth century is the century of Plato, Socrates' students, basically.

So Plato and then obviously his protege in Aristotle.

The Aristotelian school is very much obsessed with politics and political systems.

There's a lot of work being done on when we talk about Sparta.

A lot of our political models of Sparta come as much from the Aristotle tradition as much as anything else.

So yeah, there is a lot of, I always refer to it as like patchwork.

It's almost like a jigsaw of evidence.

You're just trying to piece it all together whilst you navigate something.

I know we've talked about a lot and you've talked about a lot on your podcast about the Spartan mirage.

This is sort of one of the ways we try and navigate this by bringing so many different forms of evidence together to try and build a semblance of a picture.

It absolutely does.

And I think it's also worth pointing out that there's a real, in these sources, there's a real sort of strain between other Spartans liberating or other Spartans building their empire further.