Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

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.

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.