Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

Cleom Brotus has a bit of a point to prove as well, because he's led the last few campaigns against the Boeotians and people have thought that he was kind of lackluster in his leadership.

He didn't really want to hurt the Thebans.

He wasn't making an effort.

And so he is now being driven by people who are sort of watching him.

And this is a very Spartan thing, right?

There's a lot of social peer-to-peer control, right?

There's a lot of scrutiny.

He is being watched by his subordinates saying, is he going to do it?

So Cleom Brotus has to fight.

And this is something Agus Leia is presumably relying on to be like, he'll do the job, you know?

He absolutely does the job.

I mean, this is very much it.

Yeah, he does what's expected of him, but it just goes against him.

Although to be fair, they've done that before.

I mean, the Spartans have this law against cowardice, right?

If you run away from battle, you're supposed to be punished or socially ostracized and all this kind of thing.

But they never actually do it.

Especially if a significant number of Spartans runs away from battle or surrenders, like on bacteria, they will always say like, let's just, you know, let's find a loophole.

So there's literally, I mean, we have these different accounts of these kinds of laws that exist at Sparta for cowardice.

We have one occasion where they were applied after Thermopylae because one guy survived and that was very bad for him.