Along tradition of modern scholarship has presented Greek warfare as practically synonymous with pitched battle on open ground. We are told that the Greeks were bad at sieges, combined-arms warfare, and irregular operations, but set-piece battles were their specialty and the way they preferred to fight. The single most important piece of evidence is a part of the speech that the historian Herodotus gives to the Persian Mardonius at a council meeting with Xerxes, where he seems to paint a straightforward picture of the Greek way of war:
When they have declared war against each other, they find the finest, flattest piece of land and go down there and fight, so that the victors come off with terrible loss; I will not even begin to speak of the defeated, for they are utterly destroyed.
(Herodotus 7.9b.1)
It is naïve to read this speech as fact. Mardonius is trying to convince Xerxes that the conquest of Greece will be easy. He describes the Greeks as a rabble of poor, stupid, self-destructive savages who will be easily overrun by the might of Persia. One part of this argument is that the Greeks will not hide in impregnable mountain fortresses but will foolishly try to face the Great King’s army in the field. In reality, Greeks fighting Persians did often retreat to fortified cities, attack from ambush, take to the sea, and so on. Against Xerxes, they would fortify geographical bottlenecks such as Thermopylae and the Isthmus of Corinth, trick the
