This chapter pursues a generic approach to the battles of the Hellenistic and mid-Republican era to analyse them thematically in order to highlight differences and similarities and to cast light on battle as an overall phenomenon. The battles are analysed on two distinct levels: the grand tactical level examining the 'general's battle' of deployment, command and manoeuvre at the level of the army as a whole, and the tactical level. The chapter discusses the 'soldier's battle' at the sharp end itself, focusing on the interaction of differing troop types in actual combat. It closes by discussing the determinants of success in these engagements, and argues that only through an integrated understanding of battle dynamics at the two different levels can the clashes truly be understood. All naval battles were fought very close to land and might even involve land-based forces. The combat conditions of ancient sieges seem to have provided something of a dilemma for commanders in this period.

In the Hellenistic period, war was a presence always felt in the Greek world, because of its widespread impact upon modes of organization and expression. In size the Hellenistic armies equalled those which had taken part in the conquest of the Persian kingdom. The largest warships were admittedly in a minority among the two hundred vessels at the disposal of Demetrius and the first two Ptolemies, which did not include the transport ships for troops, horses and light craft of many kinds. It is a decline that should also be imputed to the dwindling of the treasures to be won in war, and to the increasingly inferior sources of recruitment, and also to the obsession with civil or dynastic wars that set the Greek states one against another. The culmination in the development of siegecraft appears to have preceded that of the art of fortification by some decades, this being accepted to be the time of Philo of Byzantium.