Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

I mean, he's lovely.

He's one of the ones who's really fun to read because he's always going to give you something else.

And he's one of those people who every time you go back to him and read him again, you'll find something you forgot he said, but it's actually in there.

And there's so much wealth of detail and information in every single passage that he offers.

And you see scholars doing this all the time.

They come back to Herodotus and they'll find something that completely overturns some of the way that they've interpreted things for a long time.

There is so much you can do with it.

It's such a rich source.

On the other hand, it's also immensely frustrating because of all the things that you would like him to add that he doesn't, or that you'd like him to talk about in more detail that he doesn't, or where you would like him to have done a little bit more to try and get some kind of hard evidence, some kind of documentary evidence.

You know, sometimes he'll cite what Thucydides does is more often cite inscriptions and other documentary evidence that we find a little bit more reliable than the hearsay of this noble family against that noble family or stories about the Persian court.

But these kinds of things, I mean, you can obviously say it could have been better.

That is always possible for every piece of history.

But if this is the first complete one that we have, I mean, we are so lucky.

This is such an immense thing to possess.

It's been a great pleasure, Tristan.

Thanks so much.

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.