Imagine the following scenario: You are a great king of the Hellenistic era. With you, you have an army, the most well-trained, the most well-equipped, the most beloved by the gods. The tips of their sarissas are more numerous than the stars. They are trained to move and fight as one body. The phalanx never loses.

Before you stands an army of Romans, barbarians who do not even know how to speak Greek. They have coarse bronze helmets and awkward shields. They wield javelins, as if they are skirmishers, and long knives that you have come to expect to see in the hands of butchers and tanners, not soldiers. The iron tips of your soldiers will have skewered them before they can even reach close. And for the first battle, perhaps even the second, this is true. However, as you watch the battles, the Romans learn. They adapt. In every battle, they assimilate and apply the lessons taught by their defeats. And much sooner than you would want, they stop losing.

Combining the narrative skill of a novelist with the detailed research of a historian, Mike Cole offers us a vivid account of the clash between two great military formations of the ancient world: the Legion against the Phalanx. From the time of Ancient Sumer, the heavy infantry phalanx dominated the battlefield. Armed with spears or sarissas, lined up next to each other, with their shields pressed against one another, the men of the phalanx created an impenetrable wall of wood and metal against the enemy.

But all of this was happening until the Roman legion appeared and challenged the phalanx’s position as the dominant force in infantry battles. Covering the period during which the legion clashed with the phalanx (280-168 BC), Mike Cole analyzes the tactics, weapons, equipment, organization, and formation of these formations. Drawing on material from ancient sources, he examines six battles in which the legion fought against the phalanx – Heraclea (280 BC), Asculum (279 BC), Benevento (275 BC), Cannae (197 BC), Magnesia (190 BC), and Pydna (168 BC) – and shows how and why the Roman legion, with its more flexible organization, adaptive tactics, and iron discipline, managed to sideline the previously invincible Hellenistic phalanx and dominate the fields of ancient battles.