Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

You just got to fight them, put a stop to them, ideally kill their command structure, like just cut off the head as they put it, cut off the head of the snake.

Yeah, that is the origin.

So crush the head of the snake and then the rest of the body is useless.

That is how Epaminondas supposedly sells his plan to his troops.

So you just hit the Spartans themselves, hit them as hard as you can, ideally kill their chain of command, kill the king and the leading officers who are fighting in the front anyway.

So that's, you know, going to be achievable.

I'm not going to say easy, but achievable.

And then the rest will just run because they're not there because they want to be, right?

No one's there because they want to be.

It's between Thebes and Spartans.

And at that level, actually, the Thebans have numerical superiority.

Locally, they can outnumber the Spartans.

And locally, they have a force that is willing to fight them.

This is the sacred man.

And so that's what they do.

They make a battle plan where they put all of their guys together in this column, like this very deep formation, smash it directly into the Spartan part of the line, and they kill Cleombrotus, the Spartan king, or at least mortally wound him.

Most of the officers around him, and then eventually basically all of the hippies, the Spartan royal guard, are killed in the fighting.

At that point, the rest of the army just has had enough and breaks and runs off.

No, he's ill.

He's ill at this point.