The Trojan War (13 page)

Lycaon was a valuable commodity; Achilles spared the boy and sold him for a good price, one hundred oxen as well as a gift to Patroclus of a Phoenician silver mixing bowl. The buyer was a Greek nobleman, Euneus, on Lemnos, son of the famous Jason the Argonaut. But luckily for Lycaon, a family friend stepped in: Eëtion of the island of Imbros ransomed Lycaon for three hundred oxen—which means that the Lemnian made a hefty profit (assuming that a Phoenician silver bowl cost considerably less than two hundred oxen). Once freed, Lycaon took ship for Arisbe, a city on the Dardanelles, and then made his way home to Troy.

Lycaon was not a civilian and he would not have been better off if he had been, since civilians had few rights in Bronze Age warfare. If his city was conquered and he was caught, a civilian would be lucky to suffer mere slavery and not death. But it was better not to be caught, even if that meant heading for the hills. Consider, for example, the people of Apasa (probably the later Ephesus), capital of the western Anatolian kingdom of Arzawa, when it was conquered by the Hittite King Murshilish II around 1315
B.C.
Most of the population fled, many of them to nearby Mount Arinnanda, probably today's Samsun Dag, the classical Mount Mycale. This is a long and high summit, climbing from sea level to four thousand feet. Murshilish reports that the terrain was too rocky and overgrown for ascending on horseback. So his army went after the refugees on foot—allegedly with the king himself in the lead. It was, says Murshilish, a battle against the mountain, and the king won.

The loser, of course, was not the mountain but the huge mass of Arzawan refugees, the bulk of whom, says Murshilish, were starved out. Before winter came, the Arzawans surrendered, even though they no doubt knew what lay ahead: like other conquered peoples before them, they would be shipped back to Hatti as “deportees,” a class of unfree laborers condemned to menial work—they and their children. Murshilish says that the total number of deportees was beyond measure, but the royal share alone came to 6,200 people.

Whatever booty the Greeks grabbed on their raids belonged to the entire army and not to individuals. It was shared according to the number of men who had participated in the action, with the leader entitled to an extra cut. Each man's share was known as his
geras,
his “gift of honor” or “prize.” But sometimes it was a poison gift: fights over the division of the spoils are documented in later Greek history, and so were mutinies by sailors over their pay. When, toward the end of the war, a quarrel over plunder broke out in the Greek camp, probably few people were surprised.

Raiding was a mixed blessing for the Greeks. It prolonged the war, and protracted wars are often as hard on the attacker as on the defender. The Greeks may have amassed mountains of loot in their beachhead camp, but the walls of Troy stood as strong as ever. The result would have been frustration, exhaustion, and anger among the attackers. Although he is one of the few who remained optimistic, Agamemnon nicely summarizes the Greek army's gloom:

B
ronze Age soldiers were well-known gripers, and fisticuffs provided an opportunity to let off steam without serious bloodshed. But, as the war dragged on, things were getting out of hand. The supreme commander, Agamemnon son of Atreus, and the best of the Greeks, Achilles son of Peleus, had done something worse than come to blows. They had split the coalition. And the ugliest man who had come to Troy had seen it happen.

So Homer describes him: Thersites was stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested, lame, and his pointy-looking skull was nearly bald—the signs, perhaps, of a congenital disorder in skeletal development. And he had a mouth to match his form. In the manner of a put-down comic, he specialized in insulting men such as Achilles and Odysseus, which was sure to draw a crowd and to make the men laugh.

They needed to laugh, now more than ever. For nine days an epidemic had gripped the camp. It started with the mules and the dogs, then it spread to the men. Infection followed a trajectory like that of anthrax, plague, SARS, avian flu, and the many other diseases spread from animals to human, but no specific illness can be identified from Homer's brief description. It is enough to know that the beach at Troy was crowded with funeral pyres.

When the pyres were lit, smoke billowed out from the softwood used for kindling. It was “evil smelling smoke,” as a Bronze Age king put it, because the fumes concentrated the odor of decomposing human flesh. Not until the fire had heated up enough to make the oak logs burn did the billows give way to a red glow and to the aroma of burning meat. Then it was possible to forget that this was a mass cremation in a war zone. But the stink had been unmistakable all the way across the plain, where the wind blew into the city and made the Trojans cry tears of bitter joy.

At the best of times the Greek camp was no rose garden. It smelled of butchered sheep, goats, and cattle; of cooking spices, doused fires, latrines, animal dung, and human sweat. There were flies and mosquitoes, and mice; fleas too. Flea bites became infected from time to time. Lice were everywhere. And there would have been a host of minor illnesses, the sort that always plague travelers (although Homer says nothing of them), from the common cold to diarrhea.

Malaria had been a major problem around Troy until recent years. Did it exist there as early as the Bronze Age? Biomolecular science may one day provide an answer, but we don't yet know. Homer possibly refers to malaria in the
Iliad
when Priam notes how the dog days of summer “bring much fever to wretched mortals.” This season was associated with malaria from Roman times on. Imperial Rome managed to achieve grandeur in spite of endemic malaria. Trojans could have survived the disease by adopting so-called avoidance behaviors in malaria season, such as keeping clear of the wet, low-lying areas at night and sleeping with shuttered windows—just as Romans did.

The wind on Troy's hill would have protected the city itself from mosquitoes. But the Greek army, camped in the swampy lowlands, would have been at high risk. The effect on soldiers would have varied widely. For some, malaria would have been devastating, as it frequently was to armies of northerners who attacked Rome. But other Greeks would have shrugged off the illness. Adults who come from areas where malaria is rife are generally immune to the disease, having survived repeated childhood infections.

Whatever the cause of the epidemic, on the tenth day Achilles called an assembly on the beach beside the hollow ships. It was here that the quarrel broke out. The prophet Calchas, no friend of the son of Atreus, made a terrible announcement: Apollo had sent the epidemic to punish the Greeks for having turned a deaf ear to his priest, Chryses, who served at the shrine of Apollo Smintheus in the southern Troad.

Ten days earlier, Chryses had come to the Greek camp to beg for the return of his captured daughter, Chryseis. He offered the Greeks a generous ransom, which would no doubt have been accepted, except that Agamemnon wouldn't give her up. In fact, he threatened to have her father killed if he didn't leave the Greek camp immediately and never return.

The episode typifies Bronze Age religion in western Anatolia, a region with special interest in epidemics and their cure, that is, magical cure. Hittite and other ancient rituals used against disease commonly blame a god, whether local or an enemy's, for making people sick. The Hittites blamed epidemics on the god's anger. Western Anatolians were used to the connection between gods and illness, since the local war-god Iyarri was also the god of pestilence, and he was called “Lord of the Bow”—similar to Apollo “of the glorious bow.” In northwestern Anatolia and especially in the Troad, Apollo was worshipped as Apollo Smintheus, a god of mice and plague. A shrine to him stood near the city of Chryse at least as early as 700
B.C.
and possibly in the Bronze Age too.

Calchas, backed up by Achilles, put the king on the spot. Bronze Age kings hated bad news and had a tendency to blame the messenger. The Hittite King Hattushilish I, for example, had exploded at the men who reported that their battering ram had broken during a siege: he said he hoped that the Storm God washed them away! Agamemnon in turn snarled at Calchas. But in the end, the king grudgingly agreed to give back Chryseis. Then he upped the ante by demanding compensation with another “prize,” that is, another girl. “What girl?” said Achilles, coming right back at him. And with that, the center of gravity moved from the tug-of-war over a woman to the fight between two warrior-kings, a clash that had been a long time coming. The outward problem was the division of loot, but the real issue was honor. Of the various heroes who vied for the right to be called “best of the Greeks,” none hated each other more than Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles found fault with Agamemnon for taking the lion's share of the booty even though Achilles did most of the sacking of cities. Agamemnon found Achilles insolent and uppity. Achilles lacked respect for Agamemnon's preeminence as Greece's leading king, while Agamemnon felt threatened by Achilles' preeminence as a warrior.

So the two men began by calling each other names: Achilles called Agamemnon greedy, shameless, and cowardly. Agamemnon countered by threatening to take Achilles' girl. Then Achilles raised the temperature by threatening to take his ships and men and go home to Phthia, to which Agamemnon responded by making it official: he was coming after Briseis, Achilles' prize girl.

Visibly furious, Achilles gripped the silver hilt of his great sword and started to draw it out of the sheath. For a moment it looked like he was going to rush the king. But after hesitating, he pushed the sword back in again. Out poured another torrent of abuse, and then came an oath. Achilles and his men would not fight for the Greeks any longer. Achilles hurled the speaker's scepter onto the ground.

Agamemnon moved swiftly to return Chryseis. First the whole army had to purify itself by washing and then it had to sacrifice oxen and goats to Apollo. Agamemnon ordered a twenty-oared ship hauled down to the shore to bring Chryseis back to her father. The return of the priest's daughter was a sensitive, high-prestige mission. Agamemnon chose his crew carefully, selecting as captain the shrewd diplomat Odysseus, and picking men, who were, says Homer, “the youths of the Achaeans”—probably, all nobles.

The ship was about thirty-five feet long. Between the two files of rowers, bulls were loaded to be given to Chryses for sacrifice to Apollo. Chryseis sat on the raised quarterdeck, on a chair under a canopy. In addition to her, Odysseus, and the twenty oarsmen, the ship no doubt carried a few seamen, and a herdsman for the cattle; the oarsmen might have stowed their arms below their seats. The mast was up, the sail unfurled, and the ship took advantage of what little breeze there was.

When they reached the harbor of Chryse, the men took down the mast and sail and rowed the ship into a protected corner. Then they moored her, stern first. To hold the ship in place, a pair of stone anchors was dropped from the bows, and stern lines from each quarter were run onto the shore and carefully secured. The crew pulled down a gangplank and disembarked the bulls. Then Chryseis stepped ashore. Escorted by Odysseus she walked to a nearby altar, where she was delivered into the eager hands of her father.

What followed next was, from the Greeks' point of view, the heart of the matter: a sacrifice to Apollo to lift the epidemic that he had called down on them. Archaeology confirms Homer's description, showing that Bronze Age Greeks such as the warriors in the
Iliad
slaughtered bulls as a sacrifice to the gods and then, after cooking the meat, ate most of it in a ceremonial meal. In fact, at Thebes, a sacrifice of about fifty animals—sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle—seems to have been enough to give a taste to each of a thousand people!

Around the altar the men arranged the bulls, a Greek gift that, as a cynic might have noted, had been looted from the people of the Troad. There followed a ritual washing of hands and sprinkling of barley groats on the victims. Then Chryses lifted his hands skyward and prayed to Apollo on behalf of the Greeks. The cattle were slaughtered, flayed, then butchered according to ritual. A fire had been prepared, over which the priest now burned, on a wooden spit, the god's portion—the thighbones plus pieces of raw meat drawn from each leg, all doused with wine. Meanwhile, the innards were roasted and passed around to be eaten by all the worshippers.

So much for the ritual: at this point the rest of the meat was carved up and cooked on five-pronged forks. Wine cups and mixing bowls were brought out. After the wine was mixed with water, every cup was filled to the brim, beginning with a few drops in each cup to be sprinkled on the ground as an offering to the gods.

After feasting, the young Greeks chanted a hymn to Apollo and danced. Homer says they spent the entire day in song and ceremony until night fell. But having traveled about forty nautical miles by ship from Troy to Chryse, after having returned Chryseis, sacrificed oxen, cooked the meat, and having feasted and drunk, they would not have had much daylight left. The song and dance would have lasted an hour or two, until the exhausted men fell asleep beside their ship.

The paean was a prayer for all seasons and occasions, from war to weddings. An appeal for deliverance or a hymn of thanksgiving, a paean could be elaborate or simple but it always included the chant,
Ie Paian, Ie Paian,
which was mysterious and ancient, since the word
Paian
dates back to the Bronze Age.

The paean was no bacchanal; it was meant to be dignified. Perhaps the singing followed the pattern of Hittite music, where singers were divided into two groups, often a soloist and a responding choir. One example is even called “the song of the bulls,” which would have fit the scene at Chryse. But twenty-odd tired and drunken young men, deliriously happy at the thought of delivery from an epidemic, were probably not very dignified.

Meanwhile, at the Greek camp, Agamemnon sent two heralds to bring him Briseis from Achilles' hut. Surprisingly, Achilles gave up the girl without a fuss.

But Briseis left Achilles' hut unwillingly. Perhaps she had come to identify with her captor, even to love him, a sort of ancient equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe Briseis simply reasoned that Agamemnon's bed would be worse than Achilles'. Maybe the clear-eyed girl was not a lost soul but a survivor.

Hard-boiled Greek warriors speak of their women as prizes of war. But we might suspect that they formed genuine attachments. Agamemnon says that he prefers Chryseis to his own wife. Among the cattle, cauldrons, and gold, she was flesh. She represented to the son of Atreus the world he missed.

After Briseis left him, Achilles sat on the beach and cried like a baby: tears of rage, to be sure, but perhaps of loss as well. He was not a happy man. Then again, who could be happy knowing as Achilles did that he was fated to die young? Like many other men in the epics, Achilles weeps freely and regularly.

Some philosophers and critics, beginning with Plato, censured Homer for making his heroes crybabies. But in doing so, Homer was following both Bronze Age poetry and Bronze Age life. For example, both the Mesopotamian (and Hittite) hero Gilgamesh and the Anatolian storm god Teshub cry in their respective poems; so does the Canaanite epic hero Kirta (1300s
B.C.
); so do the Egyptian Wenamun and the Philistine prince Beder of Dor in the Egyptian tale of Wenamun (eleventh century
B.C.
). And the Hittite king Hattushilish I (1650–1620
B.C.
) disinherited his nephew and designated heir because the man failed to cry when Hattushilish lay sick and was expected to die.

Homer describes how Achilles appeals through the tears to his divine mother, Thetis, to have mighty Zeus himself intervene and bring ruin to the Greeks who had dishonored him. Whether or not they believed that divine blood flowed in the veins of the mighty, Bronze Age people expected that great men could lobby the gods for help. After all, a king was the favorite of the gods, as the Assyrian Tukulti-Ninurta asserted. He was a god and the sun, as Abi-Milki of Tyre told Pharaoh. He was the child of heaven and a guardian angel, as the mere governor of the Mesopotamian city of Nippur was addressed by one of his underlings.

Back in the Greek camp, the epidemic ended, but the military situation was worse than ever for the Greeks. The disease had caused a significant number of casualties, and Achilles had withdrawn from the fight. His men muttered about sailing home. The Myrmidons made up about 5 percent of the Greek force. And an oracle had said that the Greeks would not take Troy without Achilles. But we may posit a more practical concern, and that is, the Myrmidons were elite troops. Arguably, their specialty was the same as their leader's: speed. Homer frequently calls Achilles “fast runner.” Achilles' strength was multiplied by his ability to outrun others. He was one of those rare warriors who on foot could kill a man on a chariot. Every hero worth his salt was expected to be able to fight both on foot and from a chariot. But few could overwhelm a chariot from the ground: Diomedes, on foot, knocks Phegeus off his chariot; Menelaus and Antilochus son of Nestor, working as a team, pick off a Trojan and his charioteer; Hector and Aeneas planned to overwhelm a Greek pair on a chariot but other Greeks showed up in time to stop them. Old Nestor as a young foot soldier had killed the enemy's best chariot-fighter.