Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ancient Warfare magazine podcast. In this episode,

we're looking at volume 11, issue 6, victory for Sparta, the finale of the Peloponnesian War.

So joining me tonight is Jasper O'Tage, Lindsay Powell, Mark McCaffrey and Mark DeSantis.

So, Jasper, we're looking at the final phase of the Peloponnesian War.

Can you bring us up to speed with the story so far?

The story so far, the story so far is that after the first phase of the Peloponnesian War,

you get the piece of callias and then Athens gets in its head that it wants to mess around in Sicily.

That's a whole separate story.

It's a long and complicated campaign.

It is not designed to get Sparta back into the war, but effectively it does.

And they just sort of stumble back into war. And the rest of the Peloponnesian war is a long, drawn-out, complicated story, really, of how it's, it's, for an ancient, you know, ancient military history campaigns and wars are generally fairly simple

with armies go here, armies go there, they, you know, they have a battle, there's an outcome,

there may be a few more, but then you have a decisive position.

This war, the end of this war is, it's a, it's a complicated story of smaller and larger campaigns.

The influence of Persia, giving money, giving support, there's internal Persian politicking going on. There's a Persian politics going on.

There's a lot of complicated politics going on in Athens itself.

And almost who's going to win the war seems to change year by year.

And in the end, it is Sparta really

and then you could argue that

the Peloponnesian war ends in

404

but the story is still not done

...