Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

I mean, absolutely.

It's a century that Sparta starts as the undisputed hegemon of the Greek world and ends as a minor state in the Peloponnese.

All of its power is stripped away.

All of its allies fall away.

It is completely unable to reassert itself.

I think that's very much the story for Sparta in this century.

There's a real tendency, I find, where people think that the end of the Peloponnesian War has something to do with the rise of Macedon, that these things are related, right?

The Greeks exhausted themselves in the Peloponnesian War, and that allowed Macedon to rise.

There's like 60 years between those things, right?

You need to acknowledge that there are things happening in that time that also influence things.

And in fact, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, I mean, a lot of Greeks would have thought like, right, okay, that was not very nice.

But now we're back to the status quo, right?

Sparta is back on top.

Athens has been humbled and we return to the kind of structures that we had before the Peloponnesian War.

So they would have thought, you know, mostly that's the return to business as usual.

And it's what happens in the decades after that really changed the landscape.

This is a very Xenophon-loving environment here, I think.

We both love him very much, both because he's accessible as a source.

He's easy to read.

He's easy to pick up.