Encyclopedia
Battles of the ancient world
Battle pages for the Greek, Persian, Macedonian and Roman worlds — what happened, what the sources say, what archaeology supports, and what remains disputed, with every troop figure carrying its provenance.
18 battles · in chronological order
Every battle page states the forces claimed, who claimed them and what the claim is worth. That structure exists because ancient troop figures are the least reliable numbers in classical historiography, and repeating them without comment is the standard failure of popular military history.
Where a site cannot be located, the page says so — Zama, the decisive battle of the Second Punic War, has never been securely placed on the ground. Where a modern political afterlife will reach a reader before the ancient evidence does, as at Thermopylae and Actium, the page describes that afterlife as reception rather than adopting it.
The first Persian invasion of Greece
490 BCE · Marathónas, Greece
Marathon
An Athenian and Plataean hoplite force defeated a Persian expedition on the coast of Attica, and the Greek world learned that a Persian army could be beaten.
The second Persian invasion of Greece
480 BCE · Near Lamia, central Greece
Thermopylae
A Greek force held a coastal pass in central Greece for three days against the army of Xerxes, and was destroyed when the position was turned by a mountain path.
480 BCE · Saronic Gulf, Greece
Salamis
A naval battle fought in the straits between Attica and the island of Salamis, and the engagement that broke the Persian campaign.
479 BCE · Near Erythres, Boeotia, Greece
Plataea
The largest hoplite battle of the Persian Wars, which destroyed the Persian field army in Greece and ended the invasion.
The Theban–Spartan wars
371 BCE · Lefktra, Boeotia, Greece
Leuctra
A Theban army under Epaminondas broke the Spartan phalanx in open battle, and with it the assumption that Spartan infantry could not be beaten.
The Theban hegemony
362 BCE · Near Mantineia, Arcadia, Greece
Mantinea (362 BCE)
The largest hoplite battle fought between Greek states, won by Thebes and rendered indecisive by the death of the commander who won it.
The rise of Macedon
338 BCE · Chaironeia, Boeotia, Greece
Chaeronea
Philip II defeated the combined armies of Athens and Thebes, ending the independence of the Greek city-states as a system of competing powers.
Alexander's invasion of the Persian empire
334 BCE · The Biga Çayı, north-western Turkey
The Granicus
Alexander's first battle in Asia, fought at a river crossing against the satraps of the western provinces, and the engagement that opened Asia Minor to him.
333 BCE · The plain of Issus near Dörtyol, Hatay province, Turkey
Issus
Alexander's first battle against Darius III, fought on a narrow coastal plain that neutralised Persian numbers, and after which the Persian royal family fell into Macedonian hands.
331 BCE · Near Mosul, northern Iraq; the precise site is not established
Gaugamela
The decisive battle of the Persian war, fought on ground Darius had chosen and prepared, and after which the Achaemenid empire had no field army left.
The Second Punic War
216 BCE · Near Barletta, Puglia, Italy
Cannae
Hannibal destroyed the largest army Rome had ever put in the field by allowing his own centre to be pushed back, and produced the model double envelopment of European military history.
202 BCE · Not established; candidate sites in northern Tunisia
Zama
Scipio defeated Hannibal in North Africa and ended the Second Punic War, using the Roman manipular system against the tactic that had beaten it at Cannae.
Crassus's Parthian campaign
53 BCE · Near Harran, Şanlıurfa province, Turkey
Carrhae
A Roman army was destroyed in open desert by Parthian horse archers and cataphracts, in the clearest ancient demonstration that heavy infantry has no answer to mobile missile cavalry.
Caesar's Gallic Wars
52 BCE · Alise-Sainte-Reine, Côte-d'Or, France
Alesia
Caesar besieged Vercingetarix inside a hilltop stronghold while simultaneously defending his own siege lines against a relief army, and ended organised Gallic resistance.
Caesar's civil war
48 BCE · Near Farsala, Thessaly, Greece
Pharsalus
Caesar defeated a larger Pompeian army in Thessaly with a fourth line held back specifically to defeat the cavalry manoeuvre he had predicted, and effectively ended the Republic.
The final war of the Roman Republic
31 BCE · Near Preveza, Epirus, Greece
Actium
A naval battle off western Greece that ended the civil wars, delivered the Roman world to Octavian, and was immediately rewritten by the winner.
The Roman campaigns in Germania
9 CE · Probably Kalkriese, near Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, Germany
The Teutoburg Forest
Three legions were destroyed in a running ambush over several days, and the Roman frontier settled on the Rhine rather than the Elbe.
The Gothic War of 376-382
378 CE · Near Edirne, Turkey
Adrianople
An eastern Roman field army was destroyed and an emperor killed by a Gothic force outside Adrianople, in a defeat a contemporary historian called the heaviest since Cannae.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.