Goldsworthy navigates through a sea of frail conclusions, unconvincing explanations, and unreliable sources, many of which he cites throughout the text, dealing with the Roman military and how they waged war, coming out the other side into the fairly uncharted waters of how war was waged on the individual.
Goldsworthy begins with the description of Roman military organization covering the evolution of the Legion due to "the changing scale of warfare" (37) from thirty maniples to ten cohorts.
Goldsworthy states, "moral, far more than physical, factors were of most importance in determining the course of the fighting" (244), battles in this period seem to be highly fluid confrontations involving intervals of intense melee and then long episodes of uneasy face off where the difference between victory and defeat could be rather small indeed.
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