The Trojan War (17 page)

When Dolon was captured, he begged to be ransomed and readily told the Greeks everything they wanted to know. He was a “man of tongue,” as informers were called in a letter of around 1800
B.C.
from the city of Mari on the Euphrates. Dolon revealed the disposition of the Trojan and allied troops, the absence of guards around the camp, and the presence of Hector in a war council. He divulged new details about the Thracian reinforcements under their king Rhesus son of Eïoneus, with his magnificent team of white horses (a color especially valued in horses in the Late Bronze Age), as well as his chariot with its gold and silver decoration, and armor with gold details. This last piece of intelligence caught the interrogators' interest, since it offered a chance to add loot and glory to their already successful intelligence-gathering. Dolon's reward was death. Diomedes decapitated him in the act of begging for his life on his knees. Diomedes was not generous, but neither was he entirely wrong. Even nowadays it is no war crime to kill a spy, although today a hearing before a military tribunal is general practice first.

The Greeks stripped Dolon's arms and clothing and hid them under a tamarisk, with a vow to dedicate this booty to Athena. They made no attempt to conceal his body. It was just another corpse in the open. Armed with this latest intelligence, the two Greeks were able to head straight for the Thracians. Undetected, they snuck into camp. Diomedes slaughtered twelve sleeping men in a row, and Odysseus dragged away the bodies in order not to risk frightening horses. There was nothing he could do to mop up the pools of blood. While Odysseus untied the horses, Diomedes killed one last Thracian, King Rhesus himself. With the risk of capture mounting every second they hurried off with the horses, leaving the chariot and the armor behind. By the time the enemy woke up and discovered what had happened, the Greeks had reached the tamarisk where they had stashed Dolon's booty. Then they raced back to their comrades, who welcomed Odysseus and Diomedes with handshakes and honeyed words. After the debriefing, the two heroes washed off their sweat in the sea and each returned to his hut for a proper bath and an oil rubdown.

The account of this expedition is marked in Homer by odd vocabulary, unusual weapons, Greek behavior bordering on the most savage inhumanity, and by more-than-usual bias against the Trojans. Homer lays it on so thick that some scholars see the work of another, lesser poet in this chapter. Maybe—or maybe the episode is remarkable for the insight it offers into another side of the conflict, the Trojan guerrilla war.

Unlike regular warfare, which combines mass, force, and speed, guerrilla warfare consists of dispersed, small-scale operations usually over extended periods of time. Although guerrillas cannot defeat a regular army without a regular army of their own, they can weaken the enemy's will so that the regular army can deliver the knockout blow.

The story of Dolon reveals the road not taken, the road that might have led Troy to victory. Although they were dealt a poor hand the Trojans could have played it better by displaying creativity and adaptability. Instead, they were all frontal assault, focused on a war of attrition, revealing a ponderous lack of maneuverability.

The Trojans should have fought what has been called the “the war of the flea,” harassing the Greeks by taking a nip here, a bite there. They were right to stay on the strategic defensive, but they should have engaged in opportunistic tactical offensives. They ought to have used their strength, which was an intimate knowledge of the terrain, to exploit the Greeks' weakness, which was their insecurity in a hostile, foreign land. It would have been easy to use light, agile forces for the continual harassment both of the Greek camp and of parties foraging for supplies.

With their knowledge of the Greek language and Greek mores, the Trojans might also have even been able to infiltrate men into the enemy camp or to feed disinformation. They might have been able to assassinate one or more Greek generals. Infiltration, espionage, and assassination were all staple techniques of Mesopotamian warfare. But the Trojans failed to exploit this guerrilla tactic.

At least, they failed according to Homer. In the epics it is the Greeks who harass Trojan stragglers, murder Trojan allies asleep in camp, carry out reconnaissance, capture enemy propaganda resources, and patiently lie in ambush in spite of miserable weather. The Trojans send out one spy and he is captured almost immediately.

Is Homer playing fair? No doubt the Trojans made more use of guerrilla tactics than he allows, and yet Homer convincingly portrays Hector as a man addicted to a heroic illusion of a decisive victory. That is his tragedy—and Troy's.

Bronze Age propagandists were not subtle. Images of chariot charges, reports of battles involving tens of thousands of infantrymen, royalty holding taut bows, perseverance in single combat, assaulting a fortified city with shock troops mounting ladders and wielding battering rams: these were the stuff of victory monuments and poetry. Commando raids, sabotage, kidnapping, theft, spying, throat-slitting in the dark, and ambushes at the stable door all made poor propaganda, however effective they may really have been. So whatever references to such practices survive may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Homer mentions a number of ambushes, covert operations, raids, sorties, and scouting expeditions in and around Troy, almost all carried out by Greeks. In the
Odyssey
all of Odysseus's actions from his return to Ithaca until the slaughter of the suitors and the maids may be seen as one big exercise in irregular warfare, an armed uprising without an army. The chronicles, law codes, poetry, and art of Egypt and southwest Asia before ca. 1100
B.C.
record such low-intensity warfare.

Hittite laws document ingenious and active thieves who make off with slaves and every kind of animal, from bulls to pigs, as well as bees, birds, household goods, grain, plaster, a grapevine's tendrils, plows, carts, chariot wheels, water troughs, lashes, whips, reins, spears, knives, nails, curtains, doors, bricks, and foundation stones. The Sumerians write about breaking and entering, the Babylonians about raids on merchant caravans, while the Egyptians decry those who pilfer a loaf of bread or a pair of sandals from a traveler. Sheep-stealing was a way of life in the Levant and the merchant counted himself lucky if his caravan wasn't picked off.

Near Eastern societies were familiar with personal violence of every sort, from tearing off ears and biting off noses to knocking out teeth and breaking bones, to blinding, rape, and murder. They knew every weapon of interpersonal violence, from fists to clubs, from daggers to bows. Here are three examples: A king of the city of Byblos (in today's Lebanon) in the 1300s
B.C.
foiled an assassin who came at him with a bronze dagger. An Egyptian tale from before 1200
B.C.
involves an elder brother who falsely believed that his younger brother had tried to seduce his wife. Imagine him sharpening his spear and standing behind the stable door, waiting to ambush his younger brother when he returned with the cattle in the evening. A macehead was dedicated to the god Asshur by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser I (1274–1245
B.C.
).

Just as coastal dwellers had to deal with pirates, people who lived inland struggled with less civilized raiders from across the border. The farmers of Late Bronze Age Ugarit suffered raids by the men of neighboring Siyannu, who cut their vines. In Egypt during the reign of King Merikare (ca. 2100
B.C.
), there was continual trouble from the “miserable Asiatic,” that is, Canaanite nomads, who moved their flocks with the seasons and raided the locals wherever they went. One text refers to Canaanites as constantly moving in search of food, constantly fighting, never formally declaring war, and behaving like thieves. Though troublesome, the author says, the group could do only limited damage: like crocodiles, they can grab someone on a lonely road but they are not capable of attacking a town. In short, they fought like guerrillas.

There is less evidence for irregular warfare or covert operations, but there is some. Scouting patrols were a regular feature of Bronze Age warfare, from Mesopotamia in the 1700s
B.C.
to Hatti in the 1200s
B.C.
The Hittites sent out spies to gather information about enemy towns. They also employed allies to spread disinformation: on the eve of the Battle of Qadesh, for example, they had two Bedouin purposely captured by the Egyptian enemy who then fed the enemy lies. Meanwhile, concealment of their chariots was the key to Hittite strategy against Egypt in the battle that followed. And as early as around 2000
B.C.
a Sumerian poem about a war has one king send out his bodyguard to the enemy in order to confuse and mislead the other king.

If the Trojans had wanted to steal Greek livestock, supplies, and slaves, if they had wanted to waylay individual soldiers and kill or capture them, if they had wanted to send out spies to learn what the Greeks were up to or discharge double agents to spread disinformation, if they wanted to leave the enemy jumpy and worn out, they would have had plenty of contemporary models.

But low-intensity warfare requires tremendous patience, and waiting could not have been easy for the Trojans after all they had endured. Their wealth was dwindling after years of feeding the allies at their own expense and showering the allied leaders with gifts. The mansions of Troy had been emptied of the gold and bronze that once filled them. The people were tired of being shut up inside their walls. And the Greeks were stripping their hinterland of its livestock and luxuries, its field hands and finery, just as they were preventing new wealth from flowing in from the ships of the Trojan Harbor.

Hunger was a by-product of invasion. Describing the situation in the city of Ur besieged by the Elamites around 2100
B.C.
, a poet said that “hunger contorts [people's] faces, it twists their muscles.” Troy was not cut off from the world, but Greek raiders probably took a toll on the food supply. Like the chief magistrate of the Bronze Age city of Byblos when his town came under attack, a Trojan might have bewailed the lack of grain and the loss of livestock. The mayor of Byblos claimed that his citizens had to sell their furniture abroad and sell their children into slavery in order to obtain food when under siege.

Hector had no interest in a victory won by sneaking out of ditches or crawling through the mud; he wanted nothing less than glory “beyond measure, rivaling in height heaven and earth.” As he once put it:

But glory did not come without a price.

S
he had begged him not to go. Having climbed up to the windy battlements of Troy, where islands glistened in distant outline, her eyes were focused on the figures on the plain below. She scanned the battlefield, searching for her husband, unable to stop herself from weeping like a widow. And then, suddenly, there he was, right beneath her in the paved streets of Troy, beside the Scaean Gate. He had made a quick trip to town to organize a last-ditch appeal to the gods. She ran down the steps of the tower, followed by a wet nurse, whom she had ordered to bring the baby.

Andromache, daughter of the late King Eëtion of Thebes-under-Plakos, did not want to lose another man to Achilles' bronze spearhead, no matter how much her husband, Hector, was determined to prove himself in battle. She took their infant son from the nurse and held him against her breasts, which were perfumed with oil of iris, tincture of rose or sage or some other aromatic. Wordlessly, Hector smiled at the boy. His tearful wife grasped the warrior's arm, and begged him to take pity on her and their child. She spoke wise words, telling Hector to stay on the defensive and guard the walls. But the prince paid no attention. For a moment he held the baby tenderly in his arms and prayed for the boy's future prowess, then returned him to Andromache. He stroked her cheek and promised he would hold his own in combat. Then he sent her back to what he considered women's work. “All males are concerned with war,” he said pointedly, “and me most of all.”

Two days had passed since that farewell. Hector had returned to battle. At home Andromache worked at her loom, embroidering a purple cloak with flowers, an ancient talisman for bringing back a man. She had the servant women put a cauldron of water on the fire ready to give Hector a warm bath after the battle. But she had already led those same servants in a ceremony of ritual mourning for the man she never expected to see alive again.

Hector had first brought his troops to the gates of the wall in front of the Greeks' ships. Then came the night when the Trojans camped out on the plain. Now, on the second day of battle and at dawn, they would begin the drive that Hector expected would bring them, torches in hand, to the Greek ships.

The events of these second and third days of pitched battle take up fully one-half of the
Iliad.
And that is only right, because they represent high noon in the lives of the poem's two chief protagonists. But when it came to the fate of Troy these two days were almost a sideshow, and so the military story is related more quickly than the personal drama. In Homer, the Olympians play an especially prominent role in these events. We might dismiss this as epic convention but in fact it reflects the psychology of the Bronze Age battlefield. The harder the fighting, the more religious ancient soldiers became.

A direct attack against a well-defended position is never easy, even when the defender is on the ropes. The war in these books of the
Iliad
is bloody and no-holds-barred. The Greeks were determined to defend every inch of ground, and they were disciplined enough to carry out a series of fighting retreats. Although most Greeks were war weary, the Myrmidons were a strong and rested reserve force that would go into action upon the activation of a trip wire. The Trojan commander ignored warnings of the danger because he hungered for glory and shrank from disgrace. Hector's frontal assault on the Greeks was questionable from the military point of view but it did what Bronze Age culture demanded of a king: to throw his army into battle and smash the enemy, as an Assyrian text put it.

The fight began at dawn. The two sides were evenly matched throughout the morning but in the midday heat the Greeks broke through. They pushed the Trojans all the way back across the Scamander to the walls of Troy, only to be repulsed themselves. One by one, many of the best Greek warriors were wounded: Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, and the lesser but still important Eurypylus and Machaon. The Greeks were driven behind their trench and wall.

Hector wanted to dispatch the chariots across the trench but he was dissuaded by the Trojan seer Polydamas son of Panthous. Reading the omens was standard practice in Bronze Age warfare. Hammurabi of Babylon (1792–1750
B.C.
), for example, announced that he would not have launched a major offensive without first consulting the gods. The details of an operation were also matters for consultation. If a seer turned out to be a judicious tactician, as Polydamas did, then all the better. On his advice, the Trojan attack was carried out on foot. Hector divided his men into five battalions and ordered them to breach the Greeks' rampart. In furious fighting the Lycians under Sarpedon and his lieutenant Glaucus almost broke through a gate, but the Greeks under Ajax and his brother Teucer held them off. Then, thanks to what seemed like divine intervention, Hector is alleged to have hurled a huge stone at the gate and smashed an opening through which his men poured. Repair the gate or suffer a heap of corpses, a Mesopotamian priest had advised a city governor—and the Greeks would have known just what the meant.

The Greeks retreated in good order, adopting a tight defensive formation. Men said that Zeus's brother Poseidon had saved them by breathing confidence into the discouraged troops. They regrouped and, with the two Ajaxes as leaders, they demonstrated the Greeks' disciplined excellence:

The phalanx stopped the Trojans. Furious hand-to-hand fighting ensued, in which the Greeks got the better of things, especially against the third Trojan battalion. Its leaders, Priam's sons Helenus and Deïphobus, were both wounded and obliged to retreat to Troy, while the third in command, Asius, was killed, as was his son Adamas. Following Polydamas's advice once again, Hector pulled his troops back to regroup. But earlier he had brushed off Polydamas's interpretation of an omen as cautioning against a Trojan attack on the ships. Nor did Hector really take seriously the seer's warning about Achilles:

Hector was at his best and worst that day. He was as reckless as he was courageous, as arrogant as he was proud, as principled as he was selfish, as intractable as he was firm. Hector was more consistent than the Greek commanders, who so lost their nerve that it seemed miraculous when they regained it, but ultimately he was less effective. When he rallied his men for a new charge Hector succeeded only in taking a direct hit on the chest from a stone hurled by Telamonian Ajax. He blacked out but was saved by a crowd of Trojan champions, who carried him off the field and had him brought quickly to the rear by chariot. Water from the Scamander revived him long enough for him to vomit but then Hector lost consciousness again. It was a decisively bad break for Troy.

The resurgent Greeks forced the Trojans into retreat beyond the wall and trench and followed them out onto the plain. By this time Hector had recovered and rallied the army. In real life, no man could have bounced back so quickly from a thoracic contusion, not to mention a concussion suffered early in the day. But Hector seemed to enjoy the miraculous intervention of Zeus; as Homer has it, Zeus had discovered the other gods' tricks and now intervened on the Trojan side. He even had Apollo (perhaps Iyarri to the Trojans) smooth the ground for an advance by the Trojan chariots. Seeing the Trojans regroup, the Greeks began an orderly retreat, with the mass of men falling back to the ships and an elite of champions and their best followers out in front. But once the attack began and the gods gave glory to the Trojans, the Greeks ran in panic like frightened cattle or sheep.

Scattered duels did little to slow the Trojans' steady advance, killing Greeks until they had reached the ships again. This time, the Trojans drove their chariots into the camp. They needed them as platforms from which to fight those Greeks who took to the ships' decks and brandished long naval pikes. Meanwhile, on the ground between the ships, other Greeks formed a solid wall.

The Trojans smelled victory; the Greeks knew that the war could be lost in an hour. Both sides fought with the ferocity of fresh troops. This was no long-distance exchange of arrows and javelins but rather a ferocious brawl where the weapons were swords, pikes, battle-axes, and everyday hatchets. The earth flowed black with blood. Ajax refused to give up: he leaped from ship to ship with his pike. But little by little, Hector's inspired leadership drove the Greeks back from the first row of ships to the huts that lay beyond.

As Hector grabbed hold of a ship's sternpost he issued a simple command: “Bring fire!” Could these thrilling words have been spoken without a shiver? Could they have been followed by any prouder shout than the battle cry that Hector now commanded his men to raise in unison? He called out:

The Trojans pressed forward with renewed force while Ajax lunged with his spear and bellowed to his men to stand and die. Sweating, breathless, and sore from holding up his shield, his ears ringing from the clash of spears against his helmet, Ajax held his ground. But then Hector reached him and sliced through the ash wood of Ajax's spear with his great sword. Ajax was forced to retreat as the Trojan torches began to burn the ship. It was, says Homer, none other than the vessel that had once carried Protesilaus, the first man to fall at Troy.

The long day's battle was a confusion of sounds: human, animal, avian, inanimate, and meteorological (or, as the ancients would have said, divine); a dying cry or the roar of a group of men; piercing or roaring, whistling or thwacking, clanging or thudding, laughing or fulminating; verbal or grunted; shrill or subdued; commanded or uttered in lamentation; words honeyed or harsh, exhortatory or terrified. The field echoed with the thunder of horses' hooves as they drew two-men chariots into battle and, if the driver and warrior fell, rattled with the eerie sound of empty chariots, horses fleeing.

The sights of battle were terrible. As men hacked and lunged at each other, there were lightning-like flashes of bronze. At the Greek ramparts, a storm of stones rained down on the Trojans, followed by a hail of splinters where the wall was breached. The two armies fought in the soft light of dawn, under the hot, midday sun, and in the evening; through clouds of dust, up hills and down muddy river banks, past windy trees and ancient tombs. At the battle's start Zeus sent a rainstorm of blood, which might refer to the real-life phenomenon of showers that deposit red dust carried from the Sahara Desert, still seen in the Aegean today.

The seesaw of battle was dizzying. Soldiers massed and scattered, advanced and retreated as if in some mad dance. The battle raged back and forth half a dozen times over the two-mile-wide plain, forcing the men to cover an exhausting distance. The many ascents and descents of the swale leading up from the plain to the Greek camp would have left men with sore calves and aching lungs. Those who had chariots must have been grateful for the ride.

Between Troy and the Greeks' ship station lay heaps of corpses, horse and human, both fresh corpses and the victims of the fighting the day before, since there had been no truce to retrieve the dead. Many of the human bodies, stripped naked, were covered only by encrusted blood. Some were missing limbs, others had been crushed under chariot wheels. Within twenty-four hours the cadavers would have exuded the pungent odor of death, sweet and sharp. But it would have been a matter only of minutes after death before insects attacked the corpses, and birds and dogs would have followed shortly thereafter. The Trojan Plain would have been thick with vultures and crows, scattering when men approached and returning when they left. Dogs would have grown fat on the abundance of fresh human meat. Swarms of flesh flies would have accompanied the armies on their march. Butterflies and eagles would have fed on the carrion as well. No one on either side would have had any excuse not to know what awaited the fallen.

The Trojans were fighting for their homes, but the Greeks were free to load their ships and leave. No wonder Homer has the day's fighting begin with a visitation to the Greek camp by Eris, the goddess of strife. She emitted such a loud and shrill cry that it goaded the men to think

That was an encouraging start but not enough to maintain fighting spirit for the whole long and bloody day. Neither side could have kept going without continual exhortations from the leadership. Battles such as this are won not by materiel but by men. Hector, Agamemnon, Sarpedon, both Ajaxes, Odysseus, Diomedes, and others each addressed the troops from time to time, alternately scolding and encouraging them.