My field is Ancient Greek warfare. Since the 19th century, scholars have held that, around the late 8th or early 7th century BC, Greek warfare took on a very peculiar form. The Greeks supposedly saw war as an agon, a contest, that had to be restricted by rules so it could be decided fairly. They despised trickery and deceit, they banned the use of missile troops and cavalry, they fought battles at a prearranged time and place, and they would not pursue a broken enemy. Civilians and prisoners were not to be harmed; everything was settled in a single great clash of citizen hoplites on a level plain. This highly restricted form of warfare supposedly remained completely unchanged for centuries, until the long, bitter Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) taught the Greeks what real war was like.

This notion of a highly formalized and ritualized 'agonal warfare' so completely dominated the field that it came to be referred to as the 'orthodoxy'. There were few dissenters in over 150 years of scholarship, and the orthodoxy had continued to gain popularity and credibility, to the point where Josiah Ober felt confident enough in 1991 to publish an explicit list of the Rules of Greek Warfare.

Enter our hero: Peter Krentz. This scholar had published a few critical articles on battle and war in the late 80s and 90s, and so in 1997 Hans van Wees invited him to speak at a seminar series in London. The seminar led to an edited volume (War and Violence in Ancient Greece, 2000), and in that volume, Krentz published a chapter titled 'Deception in Archaic and Classical Greek Warfare' - and its appendix with 16 pages of examples. In the same volume, Louis Rawlings, Lin Foxhall and Hans van Wees attacked different aspects of the orthodoxy, from the fighting style of the hoplites to the supposed socio-economic background of these warriors. Krentz followed up his contribution with a seminal 2002 article titled 'Fighting by the Rules', in which he systematically destroyed the orthodoxy's case for each of the supposed rules of Greek warfare. Then Hans van Wees completed his shattering critique of the scholarly tradition in the form of his 2004 monograph Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities. He showed that Greek warfare was never about rules, but always about achieving the enemy's humiliation and destruction by any available means. Finally, in 2005, John Dayton published Athletes of War, in which he specifically targeted the history and supposed evidence for the notion of 'agonal warfare', leading to a withering analysis of previous scholarship. The whole concept was revealed to be a fantasy of modern academics. There was no 'agonal warfare'; there was only brutal, all-out war. In just five years of publications, a mere handful of scholars had effectively destroyed and rebuilt their field.

The impact of what has inevitably been called the 'heretic' view is spreading slowly, and there are bastions of orthodoxy left, especially in the US, home of its greatest champions, Donald Kagan and Victor Hanson. The recent volume Men of Bronze shows how implacable both sides can be, with neither side giving an inch of ground, the defenders of orthodoxy even stooping to fallacies of tradition to shore up their claims. But among the younger generation of scholars that I am part of, especially in the UK, no one still gives credence to the orthodox view. Some have even begun to refer to the heretic position as the 'new orthodoxy'. In some ways, the research of my friends and me can be described as 'mopping up', fleshing out parts of the new concept of Greek warfare that haven't been covered by the works mentioned above.

What a time to be alive!

Tl;dr: Greek warfare: field has made a nearly 180-degree turn in the last two decades