The Trojan War (8 page)

No more than glimpses survive of the force structure of the armies at Troy. The
Iliad
mentions fifty-men Trojan platoons and hundred-men Greek companies, and the Linear B tablets list what may be military units ranging from ten to seventy men, in multiples of ten. Despite differences, no doubt many differences, these armies and Egypt's probably were similarly composed.

Military logic dictated a number of common practices among Bronze Age armies. For instance, several days before the Battle of Megiddo in 1479
B.C.
, Pharaoh Thutmose III held a war council with a small group of officers, who then passed on the plan to the entire army. On the day the Greeks came, Hector undoubtedly behaved similarly: he talked over the battle plan with the allied commanders, and they in turn sent the word to their men, each in his own language.

That first day at Troy, each general is likely to have rallied his men with a pre-battle speech, which was already an ancient tradition. King Hammurabi of Babylon (1792–1750
B.C.
), for example, knew how important it was before a battle to visit his men in camp and make them “happy with words.” Whenever his Hana warriors, tough nomadic tribesmen, marched to Babylon, Hammurabi had them enter the city, where he reviewed them in parade and then ate with them personally. Thutmose III addressed his army before Megiddo. Hector's words on a later occasion are typical of such harangues:

Courage was another common theme of these speeches, and honor, and the need to prove oneself as a man. “Be men!” is how Hector and Agamemnon each goads his soldiers. They were speaking a language that would have resonated in Anatolia. Hittite soldiers swore oaths to be loyal to their commander—so help them, gods. Otherwise, they swore, they would dress like women and turn in their arrows for spinning needles. And they often mocked their enemies not only as women but as donkeys, cattle, or dogs.

A good general tailored his talk to the audience. For instance, on the eve of battle, Agamemnon knew whom to compliment and whom to shame. To the first group, he said things like:

Slackers, on the other hand, were blasted in this manner:

Bucking up the army was easy. The civilians were another matter. As the soldiers poured out of Troy and gathered on the plain, the news of invasion must have gotten out. The people of Troy no doubt reacted in various ways. Some of them were determined, some of them were terrified, and all of them were suddenly alert because the Greeks were coming. They turned away from their oxen on the plain or from the wool on their loom and they scanned the horizon, waiting for the black ships to appear. Some of them surely cursed Helen for bringing an invasion down on them. And some of them swore by the Storm God of the Army—the first god of Troy, according to a Hittite text—that they would support their troops until they drove the invader back into the sea, they, the Trojan men who served King Priam, who was good at the ashen lance. Others worried that first the Greeks would pen them up like pigs in a sty, then the enemy would take the city, killing the Trojans on the spot or dragging them off as slaves to the islands or to far-off Greece. “Bitter cries” come from the walls of cities when the land is invaded, as a Mesopotamian text sums up civilian morale.

The Greeks would not enjoy the advantage of strategic surprise on their landing, so they had to be certain to choose a good place to land. One of the keys to executing a successful landing is disembarking where the enemy is weak. Geography made this hard to do. There are few beaches on Troy's Aegean shore between Cape Sigeum and the Trojan Harbor at today's Be
ik Bay (about seven miles to the south) and those beaches lie under steep cliffs—perfect for defenders. That left the harbor itself and the bay, which, in the Late Bronze Age, stretched southward from the Dardanelles nearly all the way to the city of Troy. Today, that bay no longer exists, having been silted in by the flow of the Scamander and Simoeis Rivers. In the Late Bronze Age the west side of the bay offered a tolerable if not ideal landing ground. The place was marshy and could be reached only by entering the Dardanelles, with its treacherous wind and currents. There was a much better harbor to the south, at Be
ik Bay, but it was defended by a fort on an overlooking hill, and surely the Trojans would be dug in there.

Where, then, did the Greeks land? Homer offers no clear answer, but the clues in his text point to the west side of the Bronze Age bay; the best Hellenistic and Roman sources agree; modern experts are divided. Some argue that the Greeks would have gone for the better harbor at Be
ik Bay, that is, the Trojan Harbor. But a bloody landing loomed large, and near-term gain usually trumps long-term planning, so the Greek high command is likely to have opted to land at the Bronze Age bay. No matter where they landed, the Greeks surely got command of the Trojan Harbor eventually, and that gave them access to supplies and perhaps income from ships that stopped there, while denying the same to the Trojans.

The Trojans no doubt positioned their army between the two bays and moved when they got the word from their lookouts. If the Greeks were lucky, the Trojans moved slowly. The Greeks sorely needed to be lucky because their leaders had underestimated the enemy. The Greeks so outnumbered the contingent from the city of Troy that Agamemnon was confident of his ability to crush them. But he seems to have grasped neither the size nor the strength of Troy's coalition army, at least to judge by his later complaint about Troy's “unfair” edge in allies. If the dictum is true that in order to win, an attacker needs to outnumber a defender by a ratio of three to one, then the odds favored the Trojans.

But the Greeks had three advantages when it came to grabbing a beachhead. Their ships were, as Homer says, “horses of the sea”: fast, mobile, and, even with just their half-decks, serving as raised platforms from which to throw down spears and arrows on the Trojans below. The Greeks were experienced at making fighting runs up onto the beach; the Trojans had little practice in such operations. The Greeks knew how to jump down onto shore rapidly while holding up a shield against enemy arrows, and how to land the ships in a formation that would give their archers maximum protection.

The terror of the ships also gave the Greeks a psychological edge. According to Homer, the unprecedented armada drove Priam's son-in-law Imbrios from his home at Pedaeum back behind the walls of Troy. And, as an ancient Athenian general would note on a later occasion, it was downright terrifying to face the onslaught of enemy ships coming right at you in the surf.

But the most important Greek resource was the quality of their infantry, the backbone of their land power. The spear and the sword were the main weapons. To be sure, Agamemnon was careful to include some contingents of archers and slingers, no doubt remembering Anatolia's reputation as bow country. But his main answer to Anatolian superiority in chariots and archers was the phalanx. It was a primitive phalanx with neither the advanced armor nor the esprit de corps of the classical phalanx. But by the standards of the Bronze Age, it was formidable: in relative terms, cohesive, heavy-armed, and potent.

The Greeks fought in some ways like the Shardana troops whose arresting images stare out at us from Egyptian carved reliefs of the 1200s and early 1100s. The Shardana were foreigners who served in their own units in the Egyptian military—that is, when they weren't busy attacking Egypt in their long ships. As the reliefs show, the Shardana fought with swords and spears but not bows. They wore short kilts, carried round shields, and wore horned helmets—curving horns, sometimes with a disc-topped spike between them. The Shardana served as Rameses II's bodyguard. The Greeks were not Shardana (although just who the Shardana were is unclear), but like them, they were experts in fighting at close range. And it would appear that Greek soldiers too fought in the Egyptian army.

Recently, an exciting discovery was made in the British Museum: a painted Egyptian papyrus from the 1300s
B.C.
came to light in a storeroom. It had been found in 1936 during the continuing excavations that followed the discovery in 1922 of the tomb of “King Tut” (Pharaoh Tutankhamun, 1334–1325) and then forgotten. Although it is fragmentary and not easy to reconstruct, the painting clearly shows a battle scene. There are at least two Greek warriors fighting, alongside Egyptians, against Libyans. The Greeks can be identified as Greeks because they wear boar's-tusk helmets—a style mentioned in Homer—and because one of them is dressed in an oxhide tunic, a style known to have existed in the Bronze Age Aegean. The Libyans have bows and arrows. We had suspected a Greek presence in Tutankhamun's Egypt because Mycenaean pottery turned up in the 1930s excavation: now we know that it was, at least in part, a military presence.

To speak generally, what Greek infantrymen lacked in chariots and missiles (arrows and slings) they made up for in unit cohesion and speed. Also, unlike the Shardana, the Greeks, or at least some of them, wore heavy armor. They excelled in fighting in thick formation and in letting well-armored champions take the lead.

The Greeks were not deficient in chariot tactics, but their chariotry faced practical limitations. There was little good horse country in Greece, especially compared to Anatolia. There were only so many horses and chariots that could be transported by ship. It would be hard to feed and exercise those horses in the narrow coastal strip of their encampment or to do maintenance on chariots in a camp far from home. Add to this the numerous references in Homer to Greek soldiers like Achilles who were “swift-footed,” that is, strong and fast infantrymen who attacked charioteers from the ground with spears and swords, and a picture emerges of a nimble and lethal Greek infantry capable of paying back the Trojans in kind.

The Trojans were great charioteers, which would serve them well on the plain of Troy. The chariot was a multipurpose vehicle, used for transport to, from, and around the battlefield as well as for mobile fire support and for sheer intimidation. The chariot was part tank, part jeep, and part armored personnel carrier. Just as horses were near and dear to the heart of the Hittite Great King—“send me stallions!” writes King Hattushilish III to the king of Babylon—so they were beloved by Priam. In fact, he reared some of his horses with his own hand, just as Pharaoh Amenhotep II (1427–1392
B.C.
) did.