The Trojan War (12 page)

It was no doubt after killing the princes that Achilles led the Greeks to sack Thebes-under-Plakos. In theory the Greeks could have reached the city on foot from their camp at Troy but in between lies rugged country. It would have been easier, faster, and cheaper to go by sea. Safer too, since the Trojans could not stop the Greek navy.

Located in Mysia, the town gave its name to what was then called the Plain of Thebes (today, the Plain of Edremit). Achilles calls the town the “holy city of Eëtion,” after the king. Eëtion is probably a non-Greek name; Homer calls the people whom Eëtion rules Cilicians (not to be confused with the better-known Cilicians of southern Anatolia). Plakos, at whose foot Thebes sat, was a wooded mountain, perhaps a spur of Mount Ida.

To conquer Thebes-under-Plakos, Achilles would have needed a detachment of ships and men that was large enough to take on a fair-sized town without depleting Greek forces at their beachhead camp and leaving them vulnerable to attack. The Trojans never took advantage of the enemy's temporary weakness. Whether they missed their chance or whether the Greeks carefully kept troop strength high at their camp by sending out only small groups, we do not know. Another possibility is successful deception: for instance, the Greeks might have lit extra fires at night to hide the raiders' absence.

An educated guess is that Thebes-under-Plakos was a city of one thousand people that could muster around three hundred fighting men. Although described as “high-gated,” Thebes-under-Plakos's fortifications are not likely to have presented much of a challenge compared to those of Troy. Imagine that the Greeks enjoyed manpower superiority of three to one: a comfortable if not huge advantage. In that case the Greeks would have needed nine hundred men or eighteen penteconters, assuming the soldiers did their own rowing. In addition to spearmen, the Greek force would have required archers and slingers to provide covering fire for the soldiers assaulting the city. They would also have needed ladders, which would be raised and climbed by veterans of earlier assaults. In the best-case scenario they would also have brought a battering ram. In any case, the mission to Thebes-under-Plakos was a success: “we destroyed it and brought everything here [to the camp at Troy],” said Achilles afterward.

It began with the long ships putting out from the shore at Troy and heading south. They would have rounded the rocky coast of Cape Lekton, oars striking rhythmically. Heading eastward along the southern shore of the Troad, they would have had to their starboard the island of Lesbos, its outline shimmering in the day's heat. They would have passed scrub-covered hills and sheer gray cliffs, and heard the distant braying of donkeys. They would have passed the dry gullies of the summer months, when the snow has long disappeared from the slopes of Mount Ida above. Finally, they would have reached Mysia. The Myrmidons would have leaped off the vessels as they were anchoring, following their chief, Achilles, toward the walled acropolis on the hill above.

When the Greeks took Thebes-under-Plakos, Achilles killed King Eëtion. Achilles is said to have shown respect to the man's corpse, which he cremated along with the king's armor and then buried under a mound of earth. Considering the usual practice of stripping an enemy's armor, this showed high respect. Was Achilles' gesture a nod toward Eëtion's in-laws? The king's son-in-law was Hector, who had married Eëtion's daughter, Andromache, and brought her to Troy. “The distant Trojans never injured me,” Achilles said in protest to Agamemnon, later on. He spoke out of anger, but his chivalry to the dead Eëtion suggests that Achilles meant it.

As for the other men of Thebes-under-Plakos who survived the battle, the few wealthiest might be ransomed, some of the others would be sold into slavery, and the rest would be slaughtered. The women and children would be enslaved; the beautiful women from noble houses would become mistresses of the Greek heroes, while others, we might guess, were forced to serve as camp whores.

The Greeks took all of the king's treasures, aside from his armor; we know of two items that Achilles kept: a lyre and an iron weight, used in athletic contests—in the Bronze Age, iron was relatively rare and expensive. As for the lyre, Achilles enjoyed sitting in his hut at Troy and playing the clear-toned instrument:

Achilles also acquired a superb horse named Pedasos. The queen of Thebes-under-Plakos was exchanged for a hefty ransom, no doubt paid by her Trojan in-laws. Andromache and Hector took in the ransomed queen but she died in their house “of Artemis's arrows,” that is, perhaps of a heart attack or stroke. The Trojan connection gave the Greeks an additional motive for sacking Thebes-under-Plakos: the city was probably a Trojan ally, supplying “gifts” or intelligence or rendering some other service, although apparently it did not send soldiers. The destruction of Thebes-under-Plakos deprived Troy of logistical support and struck a blow against morale.

One of the captive women was a visitor from a nearby city. Chryseis daughter of Chryses came from the city of Chryse in the southwestern Troad, about twenty-five miles from Thebes-under-Plakos. According to an ancient commentary on Homer, she had come to visit the queen of Thebes-under-Plakos for a religious function, which is appropriate, since her father was an important priest of the god Apollo. The unlucky girl was shipped off to the Greek camp, where she was given to Agamemnon as a mistress. It would prove to be a fatal connection, indirectly responsible for the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles and its bloody consequences. But at the time, the Greeks might have looked on the capture of Chryseis as a real coup.

Lyrnessus also fell to the Greeks on the Thebes-under-Plakos campaign. As at Thebes-under-Plakos, the assault began with a cattle raid. Achilles almost caught a very big man among the livestock: Aeneas son of Anchises, prince of the junior branch of the royal house of Troy, and a leader in battle and council. We may imagine the scene:

Aeneas had been standing unarmed in the countryside, checking his cattle, the mainstay of his wealth, when the enemy arrived without warning. Suddenly Aeneas might have envisioned his fat heifers and thick-necked bulls slipping through his fingers as weightlessly as gold dust. But there was no time to cry: unless he leapt down the paths of sacred Mount Ida, his linen tunic fluttering out behind him, his leather sandals flying over rocks and tree roots, the massive Greek warrior behind him would have thrust his bronze-tipped spear into the Trojan's back. Normally Aeneas was a lion in battle who could slice through a man's throat with his spear, but with Achilles after him, he had to race down the hill like a runaway slave girl. Miraculously, he outran Achilles, all the way to Lyrnessus. As Aeneas explained afterward:

Aeneas escaped Achilles, but the people of Lyrnessus did not. We can imagine their struggle as well. The arms of the Greeks stretched over the countryside and then fell on the town, not that the men who attacked it knew what Lyrnessus was called—or cared. Chances are that they were drunk, scared, homesick, and eager to take it all out on the enemy. The men of Lyrnessus stood before the gate, more steadfast than a row of bricks. The Greeks unleashed a storm of arrows and sling stones that pushed the defenders back. The Lyrnessians prayed to the god Kurunta, Lord of the Stag and their protector, but he had already abandoned them. They could not stop the enemy from hacking at the town gate or from dragging their ladders up against the walls. A blare of horns, a volley of arrows, a roar as the Greeks topped the battlements, and it was over. The defenders died choking on their own blood or staring with terror at a severed arm or curling up beside a dying horse with a spear-torn belly.

The Greeks surely found killing exhausting work, especially after having rowed to Lyrnessus in the hot sun. They also had their own dead and wounded to look after. Some soldiers tended their comrades' injuries with herbs and bandages. A surgeon operated on a man with a grave head wound. The only hope was to drain the swollen cranium by removing a portion of the skull. Known as trepanning, it was an ancient procedure and a desperate one. It rarely worked.

The other Greeks dealt with the defeated. There was livestock to round up and jewels to loot. Any Lyrnessian males who had survived were sold into slavery on the Aegean islands. Some of the women were raped on the spot, and they all were dragged off as prizes of war. The women's future lay in hauling water jugs from Greek wells, weaving wool on Greek looms, and warming the beds of the Greek warriors who had destroyed their lives. Their last memory of home was the sight of their menfolk's corpses stripped naked by Greek scavengers and already attracting flies.

Achilles killed two princes at Lyrnessus, Mynes and Epistrophus, both of whom died fighting in a battle of spears. Their father, Evenus son of Selipiades and king of Lyrnessus, was presumably killed as well. Achilles also slew three brothers of the noblewoman Briseis, who saw them die, as well as Mynes, who appears to have been her husband.

In Homer, Briseis, Helen, Andromache, and Hecuba all watch battles from the walls. Minoan and Mycenaean art also show women doing so. A relief on a silver drinking cup from Mycenae depicts six women looking out at the fighting, waving and gesturing in excitement to the men below. But would real women in the Bronze Age have played such an assertive role, and such a risky one, where they might have been hit by an enemy arrow? Probably yes. When the Pharaoh Kamose (ca. 1550
B.C.
) took a fleet up the Nile to attack the city of Avaris, he saw the enemy's women peering out at him from the walls. Better-documented, later periods of ancient Greek history offer a few examples of women spectators during a siege. Nor should we discount the morale value to the defenders of seeing their women on the walls. Indeed, both sides in Homer evoke the women and families for whom they are fighting. The presence of women also served as a taunt to the enemy.

Briseis was taken captive along with the other women of Lyrnessus. She ended up as Achilles' mistress. As she was led off, Briseis wept. She couldn't get over the horror: having witnessed the deaths of her three brothers and her husband she would have to sleep with their killer. But Patroclus comforted her. As she said to him later:

Patroclus promised Briseis a high status, saying that Achilles would bring her to Greece and marry her. This was generous and no doubt astute since Patroclus knew Achilles well enough to recognize a woman who could win the hero's heart.

Achilles' conduct during these raids says a lot about the laws of war, such as they were, in the Late Bronze Age. Achilles might well have nodded in approval at the Hittite King Hattushilish I's description of a victory: “I trampled the country of Hassuwa like a lion and like a lion I slew [it] and I brought dust [down] upon them and I took all their possessions with me and filled Hattusa [with it].” Or, as Pharaoh Seti I (1294–1279
B.C.
) put it, an instant of trampling the foe is better than a day of jubilation. For Seti, “trampling” meant slaughter, annihilation, and filling valleys with corpses stretched out in their own blood. And he specifically singles out for the slaughter heirs as well as their fathers. The troops of Pharaoh Merneptah (1212–1203
B.C.
) took more than nine thousand hands and penises as trophies in a battle in 1208 with Libyan aggressors: common practice in Late Bronze Age Egypt. The Assyrian king Shalmaneser I (1274–1245
B.C.
) boasted of having 14,400 enemy captives blinded or, as some say, just having their right eye gouged out. Judging by such acts, the Greeks were not especially brutal; they were playing by the rules of the day.

By Seti's rules, killing heirs was common sense, and that was reason enough for Achilles to mow down the seven royal brothers outside Thebes-under-Plakos. But they were hardly an immediate threat. The herdsmen princes might have carried daggers for protection, but as far as we know they were otherwise unarmed. Did Achilles and the Myrmidons deliberately attack and kill civilians? By today's standards, Achilles might be judged a war criminal.

But we must remember that the princes of Thebes-under-Plakos were not civilians but potential soldiers who could have put on their armor in minutes. Achilles had every right to round them up or even to kill them if they continued to resist or if no guards were available. No doubt he would have kept the princes alive if possible, since his usual practice was not to kill his enemies but, rather, to ransom them or to sell them into slavery on one of the Aegean islands. As Achilles explains late in the war, after he had turned more brutal:

A case in point is the Trojan prince Lycaon, one of Priam's sons. Achilles ambushed the lad one night while Lycaon was in the royal orchard outside Troy, furtively cutting young fig wood to use for chariot rails—in other words, Lycaon was on a military mission. Achilles' operation was a stakeout. It brought little glory but potentially a lot of profit, and the great Achilles did not hesitate to stoop to conquer.