During the final four centuries BC, many political and stateless entities of the Mediterranean headed towards anarchy and militarism, while stronger powers -Carthage, the Hellenistic kingdoms and Republican Rome- expanded towards State formation, forceful military structures and empire building.

Edited by T. Ñaco del Hoyo and F. López Sánchez, this volume presents the proceedings from an ICREA Conference held in Barcelona (2013), addressing the connection between war, warlords and interstate relations from classical studies and social sciences perspectives.

Some twenty scholars from European, Japanese and North American Universities consider the scope of 'multipolarity' and the usefulness of 'warlord', a modern category, in order to feature some ancient military and political leaderships.

Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, Ph.D. (1996) is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat de Girona. He has published on Roman Republican taxation and war & peace studies, recently editing volumes on ancient disasters (Gdansk 2015) and pre-Sertorian Iberia (Barcelona 2017).

Fernando López Sánchez, Ph.D. (2002), Khalili Research Center & Wolfson College, Oxford, has published several monographs and numerous articles on Greco-Roman History and Numismatics. The main focus of his research is the auxiliary forces of the Ancient World.

Contributors are: Manuel Álvarez Martí-Aguilar, Craige Champion, Altay Coşkun, Arthur M. Eckstein, Michael P. Fronda, François Gauthier, Daniel Gómez-Castro, Rafael Grasa, Fernando López Sánchez, Polly Low, Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, José Pascual, Jordi Principal, Boris Rankov, Louis Rawlings, John W. Rich, Nathan Rosenstein, Eduardo Sánchez Moreno, Nicholas Sekunda, Christopher Tuplin, Jeroen Wijnendaele, Sophia Zoumbaki