If you would like to be first on your block to be able to explain coherently the early Spartan Great Rhetra, Greek colonization, the actual history of the mysterious Mamertines of brief Punic War fame, this is your book. This book is a serious piece of scholarship and, as such, appears to supplant all previous work in its chosen area.

While it is perhaps to the author's advantage that the period it deals with is notorious for lack of contemporary sources, I must add that I have yet to find any work that truly seems to make sense of it all.

Whether you agree with Ogden or not, you will find yourself on the cutting edge of things if you know this book, and on the trailing edge if you don't.