Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

The other account, Hellenic Oxyrhynchia, I think doesn't mention the money at all, is not interested in saying you were bribed into it.

So are these papyri?

Yeah, so this is a papyrus story, another source.

If you want to get really nerdy about it, there is a rival account which helps us in some cases and complicates things in others.

Anyway, this is why the Persians are important, but also because they have been, as I said, marinating this Athenian commander and building a fleet around him.

which at that point they actually send into the Aegean to challenge the Spartans.

And so that is the moment when Persians are sort of simultaneously starting a war on land that is waged by a coalition of Greek states and a war at sea, which is waged very much by the Persians themselves.

I mean, so it plays out very differently on land and sea, which is why Xenophon actually separates these two things.

He talks only about the land campaigns and at the very end he's like, also, we go back a few years in time and then talk about the sea campaign, which is very interesting as a historical structure.

That's actually very novel.

Fundamentally, on land, you have a coalition of Athens, Argos, Corinth, and Thebes, the four greatest cities on the mainland.

Arguably, each of them individually is a larger population than Sparta.

They band together.

They try to fight the Spartans.

It goes very badly for them.

So Sparta does recall Agasileus from Asia Minor, which is what the Persians want.

So in that sense, the Persians get this early win.

But he marches back into the mainland and defeats the coalition army that is gathered against him.

That's actually the second battle, the Battle of Nemea that happens earlier.

There's a huge coalition going against the Spartans that also gets absolutely trapped.