The Trojan War (10 page)

The Trojans had only limited choices. Tactically, they could have nibbled away at the Greeks with guerrilla raids—and we can fault the Trojans for doing so little of that. But the Trojans were absolutely right to avoid a frontal assault of the Greeks' camp. The Trojans depended on allies and so they had to avoid casualties; high losses would make those allies give up and go home. By staying on the strategic defensive, the Trojans bowed to the realities of warfare at the time.

The Late Bronze Age knew three ways to conquer a fortified city: assault, siege, or ruse. Assault meant either scaling the city walls with ladders, breaking through the walls or through a gate with battering rams or hammers and axes, or tunneling below the walls. Siege meant encircling the city walls, preventing supplies from entering, and starving the defenders into surrender. Ruse meant any trick or tricks, sometimes coordinated with traitors inside the walls, that could gain control of the city.

Each of these tactics was difficult and dangerous. To penetrate the walls at Troy meant you first had to reach them, and that meant either winning a pitched battle against the army that protected Troy or pulling off a surprise attack. During years of intermittent fighting on the plain of Troy, the Greeks reached the walls a few times, but the Trojans always quickly forced them back. The Trojans had taken to heart the Mesopotamian proverb that strong gates alone can't save a city without a strong army to defend them. Chariots were Troy's “secret weapon” and, as Odysseus knew, when men mount swift-footed horses, they could decide the outcome of an equally matched war—and decide it in a flash. No wonder that, when he said goodbye to his wife, Penelope, on the day he left for war, Odysseus told her that he expected many Greeks never to come home.

They had no supply lines from home to sustain them. Instead, large numbers of Greek soldiers had to sail off on food-hunting raids or settle down as farmers on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the other side of the Dardanelles. Thucydides is the source of this insight, and the sober historian may be right because later Greek armies did the same sort of thing when necessary. With the Greeks unable to gather all their men for one big push, the Trojan War could only be bloody and frustrating. No wonder that Odysseus characterized it afterward as “a hateful path decreed by thundering Zeus to lead many men to death.”

It is common to speak of the siege of Troy but in fact there was no siege. The Greeks never encircled the city. They built no palisades or ditches to cut off Troy from access to the outside world by land, because they couldn't. They lacked the superiority in numbers to establish a ring around the city without risking an overwhelming Trojan counterattack. The Trojan defenders were, as Odysseus says in another context, “as many as the leaves and flowers that come in spring.”

On three occasions before the last phase of the war, the Greeks reached the city walls and nearly took control of them, at a place near the landmark of a particular wild fig tree, near the western gate. If Bronze Age armies had a field manual it would have called for the use of a stratagem to reach the enemy's walls, such as a surprise attack at night or a decoy to lure his army away and leave the walls unprotected. The early Hittite rulers Pithana and his son Anitta (1700s
B.C.
?) each stormed an enemy city by night. We don't know whether the Greeks used such tactics or took the more direct route of winning a pitched battle and pushing on to Troy. In any case, their probes had found a weak spot in the fortifications, perhaps that point in the northwestern wall where a former gate had been filled in with rubble, a pile that was now sagging. It was there, under the leadership of the two men named Ajax—Ajax son of Telamon and Oilean or “Lesser” Ajax—that Idomeneus, Diomedes, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, the best Greek soldiers, nearly sealed Troy's fate.

The source of this information is not a soldier but a woman: Hector's wife, Andromache. She stood with her husband near the Scaean Gate of the Trojan wall, and the tough-minded lady gave him military advice. If that seems like Josephine telling Napoleon how to invade Russia, it adds to the evidence of the relative freedom of Trojan women. One ancient Greek literary critic even wanted to delete these lines as not really Homer's because he couldn't believe that Andromache would lecture her husband on strategy. But Andromache wasn't Greek. She says:

A woman like Andromache had perhaps the most to lose in a sack of the city because she would end up a slave and mistress to one of the victors. We can't help but wonder if her statement of three near-breakthroughs isn't another case of heroic exaggeration. But even one attempt to break through the walls would have been frightening enough to the Trojans.

Although the Greeks had much experience storming cities, their forte was attack from the sea. We have to wonder whether they were equal to those experts in land assaults, the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Hittites.

Scaling a city's wall was an elite operation, and Andromache is specific about which Greek champions led the assault. Agamemnon and Menelaus, brothers, kings, and sons of Atreus, have already been introduced. If not the Greeks' greatest warriors, they were nonetheless strong soldiers and key political leaders. Their presence in an attempt to scale Troy's walls is no surprise. The four other attackers (Andromache also mentions Idomeneus and Lesser Ajax as part of the assault), all famous soldiers, represent respectively the Greeks' best hand-to-hand fighter, their most vicious cutthroat, a veteran of their most successful recent assault on a city of the day, and an older man who was as experienced as he was expendable. Surely it also mattered that the latter two had brought the biggest contingents to Troy after Agamemenon and the elderly Nestor. Odysseus, that all-around soldier and well-known sacker of cities, is not recorded as having taken part in the assault on the walls. But the Trojans had a hard time picking Odysseus out of a crowd because he was shorter than some of the other Greek heroes, so perhaps Andromache missed him. Here are the other leaders of the assault team:

Idomeneus was son of Deucalion and king of Crete, the island that, two centuries earlier, had been among the Greeks' first conquests. He was a tough warrior who carried a huge figure-of-eight shield into battle, made of leather, rimmed with bronze, and held together by two rods. Although no longer in the flower of youth, he still loved to fight and was known as a great spearman. Along the wall of his hut stood a barbaric display of spears, shields, helmets, and breastplates stripped from Trojans whom he had killed. It was a modest version of the more than one thousand pieces of arms and armor, including two gilded chariots, that Pharaoh Thutmose III took when he conquered Megiddo in 1479
B.C.

Figure-of-eight shields such as Idomeneus's once seemed anachronistic, since they were thought to have gone out of use around 1500
B.C.
But not long ago a painted pottery fragment turned up that shows these shields still in use in the 1300s, so they may well have been a feature of the battlefield at the time of the Trojan War.

Ajax son of Telamon of Salamis was no genius but he was a murderous giant who never passed up a fight. He and Achilles were cousins. Among the Greeks, only Achilles was bigger and stronger than Ajax, and Idomeneus reckoned Ajax could defeat Achilles in a hand-to-hand fight though he could never match Achilles' speed. Ajax would fight Hector, Troy's greatest warrior, to a standstill. Ajax was more like a wall than a man, which is why they called him “the bulwark of the Greeks.” He went into battle wearing a full body-suit of armor and carrying a huge, tower-shaped shield made of seven layers of leather and rimmed with bronze. While most tower shields depicted in Mycenaean art are covered with oxhide, some appear to be metallic, so Homer's description might be accurate. Ajax's normal weapon was the spear, but he was strong enough to lift a big piece of marble, swing it above his head, and then bring it down on a Trojan with enough force to smash the man's helmet and crush his skull.

Ajax son of Oïleus of Locris suffered in comparison to the prowess of the comrade whose name he shared, so he was called the Lesser Ajax. But he was in no way deficient when it came to mayhem. He was a foul-mouthed brawler with a short temper and ready fists. He is remembered in the Epic Cycle for dragging Cassandra from the altar of Athena to rape her. Who better than such a brute to lead the first wave over the wall?

Diomedes son of Tydeus was king of Argos. Like Odysseus, with whom he teamed up from time to time, Diomedes was a warrior for all seasons. And, although he was the youngest of the Greek champions in the
Iliad,
Diomedes excelled in pitched battle. Homer details the murderous spree in which Diomedes killed the great Trojan bowman Pandarus son of Lycaon, nearly did the same to Aeneas, and even wounded the gods Ares and Aphrodite—surely a way of saying that he was reckless on the battlefield. Warriors had been wounding goddesses at least since
Gilgamesh,
a Mesopotamian epic with roots in the 2000s
B.C.

Diomedes was a favorite of Athena, just as Hattushilish III (1267–1237
B.C.
) was a favorite of the goddess Ishtar, whom an Assyrian inscription refers to as the “mistress of strife and battle.” In the Hittite king's case, Ishtar was everywhere in battle, now marching in front of Hattushilish, now holding his hand. Diomedes likewise might have felt as if he had Athena's goatskin itself wrapped around his shoulders as he fought.

Diomedes wore a full suit of bronze armor and his helmet was probably bronze with a horsehair plume. His shield was another of the figure-eight style. A combat veteran, he had taken part in the expedition that finally destroyed the city of Thebes; his father, Tydeus, had died trying in an earlier attempt. But he had not died gloriously, as a story in the epic tradition reports. Tydeus killed a Theban warrior, Melanippus, but not without receiving a fatal wound himself. While he lay dying, Tydeus reached over and helped himself to some of Melanippus's brain tissue, which he then ate. The gods approved of warriors who crowed in victory but they drew the line at cannibalism: myth says that Athena punished Tydeus by withdrawing a promise of immortality.

To storm a walled city it was necessary to use ladders, soldiers armed with protective shields, and archers to provide covering fire to the attackers; slingers were also useful. By the Late Bronze Age the art of assault had advanced considerably. Battering rams and siege towers were now common in the ancient Near East. A battering ram was, at its simplest, a long beam tipped with metal. A siege tower allowed the attacker's bowmen to shoot at the defenders on the battlements, thereby protecting the men operating the battering ram below. Another refinement was to put wheels on the scaling ladders, as the Egyptians did. Attackers sometimes built a dirt ramp up to the wall. And it was not unknown to try to tunnel beneath the walls and enter the city from below.

Military architects always tried to keep one step ahead of the latest advance in storming technology, and Troy's walls were up to date. The city had two sets of walls: an outer perimeter protecting the lower town and an inner citadel to which the defenders could retreat. At nearly a mile in circumference, the outer wall was more difficult to defend than the compact circuit of the citadel.

The outer wall consisted of a stone foundation on top of which lay sun-dried mud bricks, better known in North America as adobe. The bricks, made of a mixture of mud, sand, straw, and manure, were cheap and easy to manufacture. Adobe cushions the shock of a battering ram, but unfortunately it is vulnerable to enemy sappers, who can cut right through it; the higher the stone foundation, therefore, the better.

In the
Iliad
the Greeks build a rampart of wood and stone to protect their camp. They surround it with a deep trench, in which they place stakes. Troy's outer wall was similarly surrounded by a wooden palisade and a trench, cut into the bedrock, to eight feet deep and ten to eleven feet wide. At intervals the trench was interrupted for access to the gates. The Greeks' trench was built to stop chariots, and no doubt the Trojan trench was too, but it would also have stopped siege towers and made it difficult to use battering rams anywhere except at the gates.

The trench protected the outer wall before about 1300, but by the 1200s it had been filled with dirt, potsherds, and animal bones. That would have made no military sense except in the unlikely event that the sherds and bones were sharp enough to serve as caltrops (cavalry obstacles). Perhaps the trench was filled in for public-health reasons, since rainwater in it might have represented breeding grounds for mosquitos, leading in turn to outbreaks of malaria. The Trojans would not have known the cause of the illness, but they might have noticed a correlation between the outbreak and the trench. But the likeliest explanation is that the lower town had prospered and grown. A second trench has been discovered, about three hundred feet southeast of the first; it could have replaced the first trench as a defensive barrier.