Assessment of Greek land warfare must also reckon with currently popular 'face-of-battle' studies. Viewed positively, the 'face-of-battle' approach has revived attention to the role of morale in battle and the details of small unit combat. For some a phalanx can be found in Homer and the introduction of hoplite armour did not 'revolutionize' warfare. The Persian Wars and fifth-century Athenian imperialism would call the agonal system into question and begin teaching the art of generalship. Naval and siege warfare played central roles in classical Greece, but they were much simpler, inexpensive and less lethal before c. 500 BC. Siege warfare was little known in the Greek mainland before that time; naval warfare was more common but still relatively undeveloped. New developments in these two spheres tended to begin at the eastern and western fringes of the Greek world, as a result of contact with foreign peoples, and then to make their way dramatically to centre stage on the Greek mainland.

This chapter considers the military capacities and costs of different military forces. These capacities and costs, however, involved considerations rather more complex than, for example, the limited ability of arrows to pierce hoplite armour. The chapter covers the period from the lifting of the Dark Age (c. 750) to the end of the classical period (338). In 338 the Macedonian army of Philip II defeated a coalition of the most powerful Greek city-states, Athens, Thebes and Corinth, established Macedonian dominance over mainland Greece and put an end to hoplite dominance of land warfare. A brief description serves to sum up the treatment of military forces, since the Macedonian army in many ways represented the culmination of classical trends. The Macedonian army was powerful, not only because of the phalangite who replaced the hoplite as the mainstay of the infantry, but also because of the coordinated use of different types of military forces: cavalry of different types, peltasts, slingers and archers.