The Trojan War (9 page)

But the battle of the beach would not be a chariot battle. It would be a brawl. With ships constantly coming in and men disembarking, with Trojans running forward to stop them and Greeks pushing against the Trojan line, and with missiles flying, neither side could have maintained close order. The result would have been a melee, what Homer calls “a dispersed battle” in which “man took man” and “close combat” was decided by “hand and might.”

After all, an amphibious landing on well-defended ground is one of warfare's most difficult maneuvers. The Athenian general Demosthenes reminded his men of this when they had to defend an outnumbered garrison against a Spartan landing by sea. The year was 425
B.C.
; the place, an outpost in southwest Greece; and the conflict was the Peloponnesian War. Demosthenes told his men not to fear the Spartans' numbers, because, as experienced seamen, Athenians knew “how impossible it is to drive back an enemy determined enough to stand his ground.”

The Spartans failed that day in 425
B.C.
; the Athenians pushed them back into the sea. No doubt the Spartans were every bit as tough as Agamemnon's men. But the sandy beach at Troy would be much easier terrain for the invaders than the rocky shore that faced the Spartans. And the Spartans were infamous landlubbers. Seaborne raids, however, were almost run-of-the-mill for Bronze Age Greeks.

Bronze Age galleys could be run right up onto the beach, bow first, and that is surely what the Greeks did at Troy. This procedure generated more speed and power than backing the boat in, stern first. Most defenders would scatter at the sight of a crimson-prowed ship bearing down on them. The discipline of the rowers and the skill of the pilot would be crucial; some ships would hit the target while others would fail. A first-rate pilot, like Phrontis son of Onetor, who served Menelaus, must have been highly prized. Likewise, top-flight rowers, like the Phaeacians of the
Odyssey,
who were strong enough to muscle a ship half its length up onto the beach—perhaps a case of heroic exaggeration.

On each side the commanders would have given the men their orders before battle. Arrows were the best way to cover the distance between ship and shore, so each army would try to get its best archers in position. Slingers could have done damage too, so if possible they would have been positioned within striking distance as well. The Greeks would be particularly vulnerable as they hit the beach, a point the Trojan officers might have emphasized. But Trojans had little experience in the amphibious operations at which the Greeks excelled.

Both sides would have made an effort to get their heroes to the fore: that is, the nobles. This was a sound tactic as well as realistic politics, because the heroes were better armed, better trained, and better fed than the common soldier. On the Trojan side, for example, a man like Euphorbus son of Panthous, whose father was one of Priam's advisors, was taught as a boy the art of fighting from a chariot. The young Achilles, to take another case, was trained (according to Homer) by the hero Phoenix and (according to myth) by the centaur Chiron. The Greek or Trojan infantryman, by contrast, might have been instructed in drill, like the Egyptian conscript, but in combat he might have gotten more use out of what he had learned in scuffles in the barnyard or backstreets.

Before embarking that morning, the Greek chiefs would have had to decide the order in which the ships would come in to shore, because the harbor would be much too small for all the vessels to land at once. The commanders would have wanted elite troops in the first wave, while also saving good men for the later stages of the battle. The Greeks might expect a quick victory over any Trojan ships in their way, but they could count on a tough fight afterward.

As the Greeks jumped off their ships they would have faced what looked like a stockade of spears. The Trojans had the sun in their eyes, but if they could make out the details, they might have seen the images of lions, bulls, or falcons painted on the bows of the Greek ships. They would have heard the thud of timber on the sand and the twang of enemy bows.

Battlefields are rarely quiet as even a king like the Assyrian Shalmaneser I (1274–1245
B.C.
) commented. But as he probably knew, noise is a weapon. Homer gives his heroes enormous lung capacities and lionlike roars, and this might not be far from the truth. In the primitive command-and-control conditions of the day, a leader had constantly to think about communicating with his men. The ability to bellow was a practical advantage. And a heroic scream also served as psychological warfare against an impressionable enemy. And so Homer's description of a battle later in the war might be applied to that first day of fighting as well, beginning with Hector:

The battle ashore began as the bow of the pine-hulled ship crashed onto the beach and the king of Thessaly leapt down. He turned and faced the enemy. Leadership by personal example is always a key factor in battle but rarely more so than in the hierarchical world of the Bronze Age. If a hero didn't take the lead, no one would. So when Protesilaus son of Iphiclus became the first Greek to set foot on Trojan soil it was not merely a high honor, it was a necessity. But it was a distinction that he had little time to savor, because he was also the first Greek to die. Hector, royal prince and son of King Priam, was waiting for him. He would probably have aimed his spear at a seam in Protesilaus's armor or at his neck or at an unprotected part of his face, all common places for a weapon to penetrate and cause a fatal wound.

The great Achilles had thought about jumping ashore first, but held back because he believed that the first Greek to land at Troy would be killed. He had been warned by his divine mother, Thetis—which may be another way of saying that even tough guys go with their gut feelings sometimes. And so the war had its first combat casualty, which led to the first widow. At home in the city of Phylace, Protesilaus left a wife to tear her cheeks in a sign of mourning.

The men in the Trojan vanguard might have tried to push their way onto the enemy ships or at least to hoist themselves up high enough to grab the ornament off the sternpost as a trophy. Anyone brave enough to try would surely face a rain of enemy arrows and spears and perhaps be hacked at with swords.

It must have been a hard-fought battle and yet we don't hear a word about the role of the ordinary soldier in it. We can be sure that he was in the thick of things. When it comes to the rank and file, the silence of the sources and the clamor of reality are typical of the Bronze Age. Hittite and Egyptian texts, for example, often tell the story of a battle the same way: the Great King or pharaoh single-handedly defeats masses of enemy soldiers. An extreme case is the official Egyptian version of the battle of Qadesh: Pharaoh Rameses II killed so many Hittite soldiers that the plain of Qadesh became impassable from all the blood and corpses. Pharaoh had the help of the gods alone in this victory. In other words, the enemy is a crowd of common soldiers but our side has one divinely inspired hero.

Homer and the other poets of the Epic Cycle take a similar approach. They focus on great warriors and their divine enablers, generally leaving it to the audience to fill in the experience of the masses. Although Homer does little to put a face on the battle experience of the rank and file, other sources of evidence allow educated guesses.

Start with an Egyptian sculpted relief of the early 1100s depicting a sea battle near shore. It shows the damage that could be done by archers, whether aboard ship or posted ashore. The common man in Bronze Age armies was at risk because he had the flimsiest armor or none at all—sometimes he even lacked sandals. The dead fell, as the Egyptians said, as crocodiles fall into the water. Fighting their way ashore, the Greeks would have had to wade through corpses, often their own comrades.

Once he got ashore, the Greek soldier might have aimed at his Trojan counterpart. Well-armored Trojan nobles made poor targets, but a Trojan commoner was a fair foil for the Greek's spear or sword—if the Greek had one, and for his bare fists, if he didn't. If they teamed up, a group of Greek privates might have captured a Trojan hero and held him for ransom, arms tied behind his back, just as one Greek common soldier boasts in one of Homer's rare glimpses of the enlisted men. But surely more ordinary Greek soldiers fell at the hands of Trojan heroes.

The Greeks were not certain of victory until Achilles—by now ashore—killed Cycnus, a Trojan ally who was inflicting big casualties on the Greeks. Cycnus is said to have had the superhuman power of a son of the god Poseidon, to use the Greek name; the Trojans might have known him as the Great Sea God. To declare someone no mere mortal but a god was a Bronze Age gesture of respect to the great and powerful.

Achilles is said to have strangled Cycnus with the leather straps of Cycnus's own helmet. Cycnus appears not in Homer but in the Epic Cycle. It is a less-reliable source, but Cycnus symbolizes both the Bronze Age and the little connection Troy had to the sea.

Cycnus was king of the city of Colonae, located on the Aegean coast of the Troad about fifteen miles south of Troy. The site of Colonae was inhabited during the Bronze Age. It was a maritime location, opposite the island of Tenedos, which, in some myths, was first settled by Cycnus's son. No less intriguing, Cycnus is a Greek word meaning “swan” (compare English “cygnet”), but it also recalls the name Kukkunni, a king of Troy mentioned in a Hittite document. We don't know just when he reigned but Kukkunni was a predecessor of Alaksandu, who sat on the throne ca. 1280
B.C.
How appropriate that a name recalling both a Bronze Age Trojan king and the Aegean shore is used for the first man to die for Troy in the war with the Greeks.

Achilles' victory sparked an advance. It encouraged Greece's superb infantry to press forward, while it made the Trojans think about retreating and regrouping. When the Trojans heard their leaders' cry to give up and move back toward the city, the victorious Greeks might have taunted them, calling them weaklings, with legs good for nothing except running away, the kind of men who dropped their bows, their packs, and their water skins for a quick getaway. Then the Greeks would have looted the armor of the enemy corpses.

Meanwhile, the gatekeepers of Troy would have opened the doors wide to let the exhausted soldiers pour back into town. As the news of the dead and missing spread, the sound of wailing would rise. On the citadel, Priam might meet anxiously with his advisors. On the ramparts, the watchmen might anticipate that they would be out that night and for many nights to come. And every time they heard a stranger's voice call out, they would stiffen up.

The Greeks had taken their beachhead. After tending to the wounded, gathering the dead, and praying in thanksgiving to the gods, they would proceed to set up camp. Homer insists that for the next nine years, the camp was left unfortified. The mere presence of heroes such as Achilles and Ajax offered better protection than any wall or trenches could. Only after Achilles quit in a huff did the Greeks get around to fortifying their base. This is implausible but not impossible. For example, encamped before the battle of Qadesh (1274
B.C.
), Pharaoh Rameses II's army relied on little more than a barricade of shields for protection. Classical Sparta, to take another case, went without city walls, trusting instead its elite army (and its mountains) to scare off any attacker. But in the Trojan War, the verdict of Thucydides, who knew Sparta, commands respect: after winning a battle upon their arrival, the Greeks fortified their encampment.

Tradition says that the Greeks buried Protesilaus across the straits, near Cape Helles, at the edge of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Excavations at the site find no Bronze Age settlement after 1300
B.C.
, about a century before the Trojan War, so the authenticity of the tradition is in doubt; the poignancy of the site is not. Looking south from here, the Greeks could have clearly seen the towers of Troy across the straits, crowned by Priam's palace and the temples of the gods, guarded by a double band of walls, all gleaming in the morning light across the blue surface of the Dardanelles.

But long before warlike Protesilaus was turned over to the black earth—wherever he lay—a messenger surely brought word of the battle to Priam. Did the king look his fellow elders in the eye at the news that a hostile army had won a bloody foothold on the Trojan shore? Or was he too ashamed and disappointed to share their judgment of what his family's policy had wrought?

Maybe Priam thought back to his youth, as old men do, to a great battle on the Sangarius River in Phrygia where he fought as an allied soldier. Or maybe he preferred to think ahead, to the idea of a fresh start. In any case, the king would have to face the new facts.

The battle of the beachhead was over. The battle for Troy was about to begin.

T
he bolts are pulled back into their sockets and the double doors—wooden, plated with metal, and tightly fitted together—swing open. The travelers enter the city, passing quickly and quietly through the defenses of Troy. If these walls could talk they would scream. They would cry havoc and let the generals roar for victory and the fugitives shout for ropes to pull them up and the sappers give out war whoops as they hack away with their bronze tools. But today the walls are dead silent: a mass of stone and earth that won't be breached without blood.

The travelers are heading in the opposite direction from the one in which traffic usually moves at this early hour, when the herdsmen head out of town with their goats, sheep, and cattle. But these are unusual times, with an enemy army camped on the rich pastureland of Troy. Homer describes the outcome of the travelers' journey; let us imagine their trip.

Odysseus son of Laertes and king of Ithaca has the build of a boxer and the eyes of a hunter. He wears a trim beard and long hair cut short in front so as not to give the enemy something to grab on to in battle. He is dressed in a glossy tunic beneath a heavy woolen cloak with double folds, colored purple. The folds are clasped by a solid gold brooch incised with an image of a hound killing a fawn. If the expression on his face is a mask, it is no more insincere than the language of brotherhood in which royal scribes couch ultimatums, and no trickier than the nighttime troop movements by which Bronze Age generals steal a march on the enemy. War is deception: no one knows this better than Odysseus. His traveling companion, Menelaus, might dream of avenging his honor, but Odysseus just wants to win.

The expression on his face is a riddle; not so that of Menelaus, whose eyes glow with anger. The two men ride in separate two-horse chariots, driven by trusted friends. They are escorted by a detachment of heavy-armed spearmen but not from their own army. The escorts are Trojans, and they are leading a Greek delegation.

The soldiers are elite troops, wearing bronze armor shining for the parade ground. They are protecting the city from the Greeks and the Greeks from the city. Let the long-haired Greeks see the strength of Troy's walls but not the weak spots in need of repair. And don't let the Trojans and their wives, whose garments sweep the ground, see who is suddenly within reach of vengeance. The Greeks have just arrived in the country, but they have already created refugees and mourners.

The two visiting kings are not likely to have reacted in the same way. Menelaus's blood might have been boiling at the thought that he was in Troy, where his adulterous wife was dishonoring his name and her lover was cuckolding him and defying the gods. Paris had violated the laws of Zeus himself, the god of hospitality and strangers. Odysseus was an accomplished sacker of cities and a born scout, the most cunning man in the Greek army. We may imagine him consumed less by anger than by curiosity. The paved streets, the wide courtyards, the exotic statuettes of the bull that represented the army's god, the veiled women, the wind that blew stronger the higher they climbed on Troy's hill—nothing would have escaped the scrutiny of the man of many ways, as Homer calls him.

Ancient Near Eastern etiquette demanded that a king lay down an official challenge to his opponent. It was unmanly, said a Hittite king, to start a war with a sneak attack. The Greeks came, therefore, to give the Trojans one last chance for peace; the alternative was enmity and death. Or so they said. A razor-sharp Trojan might have known the Hittite practice of sending an envoy who held two sets of instructions, a “tablet of war” and a “tablet of peace”; one tablet threatened the enemy, but the other proposed a deal, should the enemy refuse to give in. But the Greeks were in no mood for a deal. It was up to the Trojans to back down and restore peace. Was it worth dying for Helen?

Odysseus and Menelaus headed for the home of Antenor, their host. In spite of the circumstances, they would not have forgotten to bring him gifts, perhaps including a statuette of a god, as a Greek king once sent to the Hittite monarch. Antenor might have lived in one of the two-story mansions in a newly fashionable section of the lower city. When Troy was rebuilt after an earthquake around 1300
B.C.
, the town's strict class segregation came to an end; no longer did wealthy people live just on the citadel, and the citadel was no longer just the preserve of the rich.

Imagine Antenor's house with painted plaster walls and a separate kitchen wing with a dozen large vases sunk into the earth to provide a kind of refrigerated storage. Inside a house like this were imported jewelry and seal stones, delicate pottery and silver bowls, and woven textiles and carved ivories. Perhaps it was even Antenor who owned a bronze figurine of a man standing in a gesture of prayer: a wide-eyed, straight-nosed piece, apparently of Hittite workmanship. (This figurine has just recently been excavated at Troy.)

Although a Trojan, Antenor was a friend of the Greeks. He was an important person in Troy, an elder statesman, noble, and royal advisor. He was married to Theano daughter of Cisseus, who was priestess of Athena, which is a sign of Antenor's social prominence. Antenor always took the Greeks' side in Trojan debates, and we might guess that he had business interests, kinship, and marriage ties that allied him with Greeks. As for Athena, the Trojan equivalent isn't known, but we can assume there was one, because Anatolian cities often had a protector goddess.

Antenor had reason enough to speak for peace without Greek influence: he had many sons whom he no doubt did not wish to sacrifice in war. So when Menelaus and Odysseus spoke up in the Trojan assembly, Antenor supported them. The Greeks demanded that Helen and the stolen treasures of Sparta be returned.

The two Greek speakers made a lasting impression on Antenor. Menelaus was more imposing physically but the lesser speaker. Menelaus said what he had to but he seemed to be in a hurry to get the words out. Just minutes away sat his wife, Helen, under Paris's roof. Menelaus surely knew that every man in the gathering looked at him with scorn. Every word might be taken as a sign of weakness, so no wonder the man kept his speech short.

Odysseus was different. His remarks were delivered with the strategic skill that was his trademark. First, he softened up the audience by playing the hick, too intimidated by the big city to do any more than hold his scepter and look at the ground. But when his turn came, Odysseus let out words that fell on the assembly like a snowstorm. It was a verbal reminder of the man's toughness. War was Odysseus's business. As he reminded Agamemnon when the going got rough:

But the Trojans did not give Odysseus what he wanted. Indeed, things nearly got out of hand in the unruly assembly. The leading hawk was another important Trojan, Antimachus. Like Antenor, he had sons. But the prospect of their corpses on the funeral pyre did not soften his stand: there could be no surrender to the Greeks. Antimachus was a man of fiery temper, but Homer says that something else was afoot: Antimachus had been bought by Paris with especially good gifts, namely, a large amount of gold, no doubt from the hoard brought back from Sparta.

Not only did Antimachus argue against returning Helen or the stolen treasures, he said that the Trojans should kill Menelaus then and there. This would have been “disgraceful” and “an outrage,” as Agamemnon later put it. But it would have been a smart move. Killing Menelaus would not only have cost the Greeks a prominent (if not overly effective) leader, but it would also have stripped the war of its logic. The Greeks would have found themselves fighting to return Helen to a dead man and to avenge a murdered king—in fact, two murdered kings, since killing Odysseus would have been a brilliant stroke too. In the long run, no Greek would do more harm to Troy than he did, although the Trojans could not have known that yet.

In the end, the two men were given safe passage back to their camp at the sea. But they returned empty-handed, without Helen or the treasure. And surely Priam approved of that. He had certainly welcomed the adulterous queen to Troy, and he treated her with warmth and chivalry, as Homer shows. While other Trojans blamed the war on Helen, Priam insisted that, as far as he was concerned, it was the gods and not she who were responsible. And he never lifted a finger to return her to the Greeks.

But he couldn't afford to. Priam did not have the luxury of waging war without considering domestic politics. No king did. Civil war lurked in Bronze Age cities, from Canaanite towns to the Hittite capital. One Canaanite mayor confessed his fear of his own peasantry; another was driven into exile by a younger brother who despised him. In Hittite history, a whole population or just part of it could force a city into surrendering. Troy itself had suffered civil war not long before in the 1200s
B.C.
, forcing the exile of King Walmu, a Hittite ally. So Priam and his family had to tread carefully.

Returning Helen would be admitting that it had been a mistake to let her into Troy in the first place. And that admission might well bring the downfall of the house of Priam. It would have been an invitation for a coup by a member of another branch of the royal family, which was not short of pretenders, or even by an outsider like Antenor.

Meanwhile, Priam's supporters in the assembly could argue against appeasement. Give back Helen and the treasures, and the greedy Greeks would ask for more. Accept the ambassadors' demands, and say goodbye to Trojan independence. Let the enemy just try to storm the city: he would stop in frustration soon enough. All that Troy needed was patriotism and patience, the argument might go.

So Priam and his people would face the war and fight to win. That left the Greeks with no choice but to sharpen their spears and wage war with everything they had. Menelaus might have glowed at the thought of vengeance and at the sweet odor of death. But the shadow of Troy's massive walls would have fallen over Odysseus's thoughts, pragmatist that he was.

The question of what the Greeks did next—of how they fought—is much more difficult than it might seem. There is no direct answer in the
Iliad,
focusing as it does on the penultimate part of the war. Another early ancient epic, the
Cypria,
discusses the previous phases of the war. But only a few lines of this poem survive and the
Cypria
is less reliable than Homer. Fortunately, Homer provides clues about the earlier fighting.

The first clue comes from a comment by Poseidon, the god of the sea, horses, and earthquakes. Even mythological figures such as the gods speak to Homer's authenticity. Ancient peoples were deeply religious. In the Bronze Age, for example, Hittite and Egyptian accounts regularly give the gods a role in military campaigns. No Hittite scribe would think of recording a victory without thanking the gods for having marched in front of the army and thereby having granted the king success. No ambassador would swear to abide by a treaty unless an assembly of the various gods had witnessed it. In his poem about the battle of Qadesh (1274
B.C.
), Pharaoh Rameses II declares that the god Amun spoke to him and sent him forward.

Even in the rationalistic heyday of classical Greece—and later—gods and heroes were commonly seen in the heat of battle. Sometimes their mere presence provided encouragement to the soldiers. At other times, divinities gave specific military advice. And sometimes they even fought! At the decisive battles of Marathon (490
B.C.
), Salamis (480
B.C.
), Aegospotami (405
B.C.
), and Leuctra (371
B.C.
), for example, contemporaries thought that gods and heroes took part.

On the treacherous plain of Troy the only rock of certainty was the gods. Men needed to believe that the deities cared about their fate because the alternative was the loneliness of death. So when Homer sets verse after verse in Olympus, he is not offering mere window-dressing; he is opening a window into the soul of the ancient Greek soldier. And when Homer quotes a god, he may be reporting what men claimed to have heard at the time.

By the ninth year of the war, in an attempt to buck up the Greeks when the battle was going badly, Poseidon cast scorn on the enemy. The ninth year, that is, in Homer's reckoning: we have already seen that the real war was much shorter. How can the Greeks let the Trojans push them back on their ships, he asks, when the Trojans usually behave like frightened deer? The Trojans have been running through the woods as if afraid of the wolves; defenseless creatures without a heart for battle. They were never willing to stand their ground against the armed might of the Greeks.

Achilles makes a similar claim. He says that up to now Hector had never wanted to fight far from the walls, and he would advance no farther than the oak tree near Troy's main or Scaean Gate. There he would have the help of soldiers stationed in the towers at either side of the gate. Even so, the Greek adds, Hector once barely escaped Achilles' charge. And Hera goes one better: she claims that when it came to the Dardanian Gate, Hector wouldn't dare so much as go outside the walls—presumably because this postern gate lacked protective bastions.

This is exaggeration, but the Trojans did indeed spend most of the war on defense, leaving attacks to the Greeks. Perhaps some of the Trojans were cowards, as Poseidon says, but most were sound strategists. Like their brethren elsewhere in the ancient Near East, they knew that coming out and fighting made better rhetoric than strategy.