Dr. Owen Rees

399, so five years after the Peloponnesian War.

We have a conspiracy in Sparta to overthrow the entire citizenry, the entire structure of the Spartan political system.

The Kynodon conspiracy were basically a rather disaffected non-Spartan, but not foreign or enslaved.

So he's likely to either be someone who's sort of fallen out of the Spartan system because he hasn't got enough money, or conversely, he might well have been sort of half Spartan.

We're not 100% sure.

and he seems to have united a group of helots, so that's the enslaved population.

We've got the perioikoi, who were the people living around Sparta but aren't citizens.

And we've also got other disgruntled previous Spartans who, inferiors is what they're called in the source material, and there seems to be a conspiracy to basically band together and overthrow

the Spartan system with the idea of sharing out that kind of citizen rights to everyone.

So this is going on in Sparta.

It is completely subdued by the kings.

It is resolved.

Cynodon is rather brutally and publicly paraded around, whipped and executed.

But it gives you the idea of actually there are things going on in Sparta.

The Spartans are not happy

internally.

Do Persia know about that?

I don't know.

There's no way of us really knowing that.

But what they are doing is also creating further stress to a system that is already in a potential period of flux.