Over the past decades, military historians have considered tactics an outdated field of study. Ancient Greek tactics in particular have been despised as ‘deliberately stunted’ (p. 4) and interpreted according to a theoretical paradigm that presents Greek battle as a highly ritualised encounter between homogeneously equipped and strikingly unimaginative heavy infantry forces. K.’s study, a revised and updated version of his Ph.D. thesis, seeks to undermine this traditional approach and replace it by an alternative paradigm that grows from a reconsideration of the cultural and material context of Greek tactics. In consequence, K. attempts to answer ‘basic questions about a culture's way to fight’ (p. 2): the options available and choices taken on the battlefield, the conditions and principles that ruled them, and their aims and intentions; in other words, what did the Greeks ‘think was acceptable and achievable in battle’. This approach, with clearly stated aims and scope, seems extremely useful and illuminating both for students and specialists.

The book focuses specifically on tactics, approaching them from the broader perspective of culture and ideology, in order not only to offer an alternative explanation for the Greek way of war, but also to illuminate the complex relationship between warfare and culture. It is centred on land battles of the Classical period, a scope that leaves aside not only other spheres of combat such as assault and defence of settlements or naval warfare (as K. recognises himself, p. 4) but also other crucial periods of Greek warfare. K., however, seeks no comprehensive study of Greek tactics as a whole, but a discussion of the longstanding academic approaches and interpretations of pitched battles, arguably the Greeks’ most popular and thoroughly analysed military activity, so the choice seems reasonable in the context of recent scholarship. Bearing in mind the extraordinary importance of warfare both in Greek culture and in modern literature, a reinterpretation of Greek tactics from a cultural perspective has a considerable scholarly impact.

The book is structured in a straightforward manner. Two ‘introductory’ chapters deal with the academic debates and theoretical perspectives that have determined the scholarly analysis of Greek tactics; then, four chapters address the successive phases of a Greek pitched battle, following the timeline of the encounter from the choice of the battlefield to the final pursuit of the defeated side. The backbone of the book is, then, the Greek battle itself. A final chapter of conclusions and the usual sections of bibliography, references and general index complete the work. The choice of a chronological layout seems natural, given that K. tries to reconsider tactics throughout the different stages of a pitched battle; the originality lies not only in the depth of his analysis, but also in the introductory chapters themselves, which set the conditions and peculiarities of the academic discussion and present K.’s own perspective.

The first chapter, ‘The Prussian Model of Hoplite Battle’, traces the origins of the modern picture of Greek tactics back to a group of nineteenth-century German scholars whom K. labels ‘the Prussians’ (p. 7). They are presented as responsible for elaborating the theoretical view of Greek combat and tactics as a ritualised and rigidly organised event involving only heavy infantry, a model that would be adopted by English scholars in the first half of the twentieth century and by American scholars in the second half, creating a continuity that only the most recent ‘heretical’ (p. 6) works seem to have started to break. K. presents a deep and thorough survey of the literature of the nineteenth century, in the line of similar efforts carried out recently by other scholars (such as D. Kagan, G. Viggiano and P. Krentz in Men of Bronze. Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece [2013]), which helps to understand that some ideas that we now take for granted were elaborated and established at some point in the recent past according to a particular set of conditions and preconceptions. Any new contribution to the discussion on Greek warfare, hoplite combat or the emergence of the phalanx should take this chapter into consideration.

K. develops his own approach in the second chapter, in which he addresses the question of training. His thorough and detailed discussion arises as an alternative to the arguments of the ritualist model: the real cause behind the ‘relative simplicity of Greek warfare’ is, he argues, ‘the general lack of, and even aversion to, military training’ (p. 39). The overall amateurism of Greek armies has been repeatedly emphasised before, but K. is right that the implications of that fact have not been fully explored so far and that there has been no substantial debate on the issue, so his chapter is a very welcome piece of research. K. crucially differentiates between formation drill and weapon proficiency, ultimately reaching the same conclusion: the amateurism and lack of training of Greek citizen armies must be taken as a given, with their profound implications in the tactical thought and practice of the period.

Chapter 3 deals with the time and place of the battle, in a thorough analysis that supports P. Krentz's impression that Greek battles were far from prearranged encounters. In fact, K. offers evidence of active manipulation of the conditions of battle in order to surprise or deceive the enemy, and argues that deceptive behaviour ‘became the explicit advice of military thinkers of the fourth century’ (p. 91) and thus made its way into the tactical treatises of the late Classical period. Chapter 4 addresses the question of the deployment of troops in battle order, including detailed considerations about the position of light troops and cavalry, the particular formations, the distribution of positions of honour (with discussions of the relevance of the right wing and of the othismós) and the depth of the line.

Chapter 5 discusses tactical manoeuvres. K. presents the chaotic circumstances of the battlefield and the various factors that hindered the control of the battle by the commander, concluding that controlling an amateur militia of Greek citizen-soldiers was an almost impossible task. He analyses under that light the development of selected or elite units for specific tasks and stresses that there was room for tactical actions during the battle, a reaction on the spot to the battle plan of the enemy. The final chapter addresses important topics such as the ‘collapse’ of the line, the factors that forced one side to turn back and flee and the pursuit, which K. presents not only as a common feature in hoplite battles, but also as the final goal of all the tactical planning developed in the previous stages (p. 194). In his opinion, the aftermath of the battle and its ‘last rites’ (the tropaion, the truce to recover the dead) intended to assert the verdict of the battle and to force the losing side to acknowledge the result, actions that must be read in cultural terms as a way to materialise the temporary superiority of a community over the other.

The book is a very thorough and coherent analysis of a controversial question, carefully argued and heavily supported by literary evidence. K. commands both the modern literature and the main Classical sources on the topic, which allows him to present a vast amount of data integrated in detailed discussions and fresh reflections on every aspect of the Greek (approach to) battle. This monograph will certainly contribute to fuel the endless debate on the nature of Greek warfare.