The Trojan War (5 page)

This was not just wishful thinking. It may seem incredible that Helen or Paris thought they could attack the institution of royal marriage without war. But there was precedent. Pharaoh Ay of Egypt had lived down the murder of Hittite prince Zannanza, en route to Zannanza's arranged marriage with Ankhesenamun, the widowed queen of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The murdered prince's father, King Shuppiluliuma I (1344–1322), was one of the strongest of all Hittite kings. Yet his response was a routine attack on Egyptian possessions in southern Syria. Thousands of prisoners were hauled back to Hattusha, but this was no showdown. Shuppiluliuma did not even take part in the campaign, perhaps because he faced other threats on the northern and eastern borders. In short, the Hittite response was little more than a punitive raid, the Bronze Age equivalent of lobbing a few cruise missiles over the border. Pharaoh must have breathed a sigh of relief.

As for the Greeks, it was one thing to threaten to invade Troy and quite another to pull off an invasion. Imagine Priam's reaction to the news of Helen's abduction: whatever his worries, Priam might well have doubted that a Greek army would ever dare appear before Troy's fortifications. If the Greeks did come it would be too late for regrets because backing down would have destroyed Priam's prestige. But Priam surely believed that between Troy's allies and its walls, the city was impregnable. The Greeks would be hard-pressed to carry out more than a few raids, then they would fight over the booty and turn on each other. Surely the expedition would go home after a few months, while Paris kept Helen. Like Pharaoh Ay in the Zannanza affair, Priam might have expected to pay a price for misbehavior but not a very big price.

In any case, Agamemnon would have no easy time persuading the other Greeks into a big and risky war against Troy. A tradition, not mentioned in Homer, records an oath supposedly sworn by all the princes of Greece to uphold Menelaus's claim to Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, not to mention Greece's premier heiress. The hard-nosed historian Thucydides dismisses this story. He says the other Greeks followed Agamemnon not as an act of grace but because they feared his power.

No doubt Agamemnon was able to twist arms, but Thucydides' analysis is one-sided. The king of Mycenae had the gods on his side. The Bronze Age generally thought of war as a divine drama of law enforcement: war punished criminals who had offended the gods. The Hittites gave this conception a twist and imagined war as a lawsuit before the gods, who would favor one of the plaintiffs with victory. To the Greeks, Paris had twice violated the gods' laws, first by committing adultery and second by abusing his host's generosity. Menelaus's fellow rulers had a clear responsibility to avenge the gods by going to war against Troy unless Helen and the treasures were returned. Anything less would expose themselves to divine punishment.

Even the most pious Greek might have balked at throwing himself against the mighty walls of Troy, but there were compensations. The Greek kings no doubt knew that war would keep their fighting men busy and out of trouble at home. And the potential for plunder outside Troy's walls sweetened the deal. Bronze Age invasions usually included raids, like those carried out under the Hittite King Hattushilish I (1650–1620
B.C.
), whose armies plundered the cattle and sheep of an Anatolian enemy's farmers. The Greeks surely relished the chance of doing likewise to the Troad and nearby islands.

They were not likely to have had second thoughts about the pretext for the war, because the Bronze Age was not finicky about the
casus belli.
Conquest was its own reward. It brought glory, honor, and an occasion for king and commoner alike to display what the Hittites referred to as “manly deeds.” The victors also got loot, both inanimate and human, including slaves, both male and female. In the reign of Hattushilish III, to cite an example, seven thousand Hittite subjects were transplanted from Lycia (in southwestern Anatolia) to Greece.

In the Bronze Age, women were often regarded as a commodity. The victorious King Zimri-Lin of Mari (in Syria, 1789–1752
B.C.
), brought back women captives to serve as weavers and harem mates. In the 1300s, a pharaoh ordered one of his vassals in Canaan to buy him forty “extremely beautiful” female cupbearers; he sent silver weighing sixteen hundred shekels, forty per woman, as well as an escort of archers to bring them back to Egypt. In the Greek kingdom of Pylos, women played a big role in the woolen industry, for instance, as weavers, spinners, and sheep shearers. Linear B tablets from around 1200
B.C.
identify about fifteen hundred women and children in these jobs. Some came from places located up and down the coast of Anatolia as well as from the Aegean islands. Others are labeled as “captives,” and it is a good guess that they had been seized by Greek raiders. No wonder that, centuries later, the Greek historian Herodotus commented that when Paris ran back to Troy with Helen wife-stealing was an old custom.

Helen was not the cause but merely the occasion of the war. By seducing a Greek princess, Troy had interfered in the politics of the Greek kingdoms and humiliated a powerful man. It was dangerous to hurt an enemy without destroying him; as one of the Amarna Letters says, when an ant is struck it bites back, and on the hand of the man who struck it. And there remained the underlying causes of war: resentment, greed, and power lust. Troy had everything that was dear to the Greeks' rapacious hearts. If Paris had come from Dogpatch instead of Troy, then the king would have found few takers for the mission to avenge the gods and uphold Menelaus's honor. But Agamemnon rallied the Greeks to attack a gold mine.

And so the harbor of Aulis filled up with the black ships in which the Greeks planned to sail off to war.

T
he king of all Argos and of many an isle stands on the rocky soil and surveys his fleet. Before him in the harbor lie hundreds of wooden ships, their hulls coated with black pitch, their hollow interiors carrying men and supplies, preparing to bring ruin to King Priam and the people of Troy. Or so we might imagine King Agamemnon, son of Atreus, on the eve of the Greeks' departure for war.

The hills echo with the shouts of the harbormaster and the cries of the captains. Horses are whinnying, low, fast, and urgently. Sailors call out curses and every now and then there comes the crack of a stick on the back of some slacking menial. The priests are mumbling something to each other, the oxen bellow, and in the distance, through the noise, there is the sound of the salt sea slapping against the ships.

Agamemnon towers above his servants. He is a big man, healthy and muscular. Homer gives him the broad shoulders of a javelin champion, and as a king he is likely to be well fed and tall—nearly six feet tall, to judge from the skeletons found in the royal graves of Mycenae. That was a great height then, when the average Greek male stood only about five feet five inches. He is a veteran warrior, but if Agamemnon has a broken bone or two from past battles, it doesn't show, because the fractures would have been set by the palace physician and so would have healed perfectly. He has long hair and fiery eyes that offer, in turn, hints of passion, brutality, and resignation. His lips border a beard, his teeth shine gleaming white. He is dressed in a soft, newly made tunic underneath a big, sleeveless cloak. He wears fine leather sandals. A silver-studded sword hangs from an oxhide strap around his shoulders. On sleepless nights, says Homer, when the cares of office weigh, Agamemnon is in the habit of replacing the cloak with a lion skin, a reminder of his power.

He was the greatest king in Greece. Potential rivals ruled in Pylos and Tiryns, but Sparta was in the hands of his younger brother and the power of Thebes had been broken in a civil war the generation before. No wonder Homer reserves for Agamemnon the title
anax,
harkening back to the Bronze Age term for king:
wanax.
Agamemnon was rich and had a big army and navy. His domain was centered in the northeastern Peloponnese but it extended to the islands of the Aegean, perhaps as far east as Rhodes.

Homer's Agamemnon is arrogant, which makes him similar to the many Bronze Age kings whose monuments invited the mighty to look upon their works and despair. Take the king of Mari, Iahdun-Lim (1820–1798
B.C.
), who describes himself in an inscription as “opener of canals, builder of walls, erector of steles proclaiming [his] name, provider of abundance and plenty for his people, who makes whatever [is needed] appear in his land, mighty king, magnificent youth.” No doubt Agamemnon had an equally high opinion of himself. But he was no autocrat.

Agamemnon's kingdom was typical of its times; it was less a state than an estate, that is, it was essentially a big household. The royal palace had grand staterooms but most of its space was devoted to workshops, storerooms, and armories. It was a manor that produced luxury goods for the
wanax
to trade or give as gifts. Raw materials for the workshops were siphoned off the king's subjects as taxation.

More important, from the military point of view, the palace produced bronze breastplates and arrowheads, manufactured and maintained chariots, and stabled horses. The
wanax
controlled a corps of charioteers and bowmen and possibly one of infantrymen too. In any case, as powerful as he was, the
wanax
probably had no monopoly on the kingdom's military force.

The royal writ was strongest on the king's landholdings, concentrated around the palace. The rest of the territory was run by local big men or
basileis,
each no doubt with his own armed followers. The
wanax
could muster an army and navy out of his own men, but for a really big campaign he would need the support of the
basileis.
In short, the
wanax
was only as strong as his ability to dominate the
basileis,
be it by persuasion or force.

And he had better things to do with his time than learn the rebuslike system for recording Greek that we call Linear B. Homer takes a lot of criticism from scholars who cite the total absence from the epics of the Linear B tablets. But Linear B was used strictly for administrative convenience. Unlike Hittites or Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks did not put writing on their monuments, boundary markers, wall paintings, or seal stones. So a
wanax
such as Agamemnon was no more likely to know Linear B than Queen Victoria was to know shorthand.

But one text the king might have learned was lines of poetry sung by bards at palace feasts; Mycenaean art shows that bards predated Homer by centuries. Poetry offered the possibility of immortality. Agamemnon already had honor, power, and glory as a “scepter-bearing king”—the term is Homer's, but the royal scepter was already a symbol of power in Sumer, two thousand years before the Trojan War. Agamemnon was a man of many possessions, but now he wanted more.

Greece's pulse quickened as the heralds of the
wanax
made their rounds to call the other kings into action. Agamemnon's peasantry had to look enthusiastic as the king's men rounded them up to serve. The Greek monarchs were no doubt blunter: Troy was an impregnable fortress and only a fool would try to take it. No wonder Homer says that Odysseus kept Agamemnon and Menelaus cooling their heels on rocky Ithaca before he agreed to join the expedition. But in the end, fear, greed, glory, and the gods won out. So they came to Aulis, the best of the Greeks, as perhaps they had never come together before.

There was Nestor, the grand old man of Pylos and most eloquent of the Greeks; Odysseus, the canny lord of Ithaca, Zacynthus, and other islands; Philoctetes, great archer from the rugged country around Mounts Ossa and Pelion; Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother and king of Sparta; Diomedes, the champion “of the great war cry” and the youngest general in the Greek army, who led a contingent from Argos and Tiryns; Ajax son of Telamon of Salamis, the so-called Greater Ajax, known as the Greeks' bulwark if not their brains; Ajax son of Oïleus of Locris, called Lesser Ajax, a hot-blooded bruiser who was spoiling for a fight; and the fearless Protesilaus of Thessaly. A different group of men testifies to the prior Greek penetration of the Aegean: Idomeneus of Crete, the island that Greek arms had grabbed from the Minoans; Tlepolemus son of Heracles, a thug who had murdered his great-uncle on the mainland and moved to Rhodes; and men from the other Dodecanese islands of the southeastern Aegean Sea. Finally, to return to the mainland, there was Greece's greatest warrior, a man known as the best of the Greeks, prince of the central Greek region of Phthia, leader of the fearsome unit of warriors called the Myrmidons: Achilles.

Maybe they are all fiction, but as a group they represent the Bronze Age art of war. Their hands were battle-wise with blood and calloused from stealing cattle. They could trample the enemy like a carpet under their feet or calm the heart of a nervous army under attack. They knew horses like a stable hand and ships like a boatswain, but most of all they knew men and how to lead them. They could be as smooth as the ghee-and-honey paste with which Assyrians cemented rows of mud brick or as rough as the gnarled limbs of an old olive tree. They knew which soldiers to reward with silver rings and which to punish with prison or mutilation. They could inspire the men to follow on foot while they rode in their chariots and to compete for the honor of fighting bravely in their presence.

They could break an enemy's lance or deceive him with words. They knew how much flour it took to feed an army and how much wood was needed to burn a corpse. They knew how to pitch camp or launch a fleet, how to debrief a spy or send out an informer. They could draw a bow and split a copper ingot like a reed or hurl a spear and pierce the seam in an enemy's armor. They shrugged off mud and snow, towering waves or buckets of rain. They could appraise lapis lazuli with a jeweler's eye or break a merchant's neck with a hangman's hands. They could court a milkmaid or rape a princess. They relished ambushes after dark and noontime charges. They feared the gods and liked the smell of death.

They knew war in all its bloody ways, but they shared a single dream: to set sail home from Troy in ships with timbers creaking from the weight of plunder. Achilles says that he plundered no fewer than twenty-three cities in the Trojan War and Odysseus proudly calls himself “sacker of cities.” It was a fitting motto for the Bronze Age way of war, and an inspiration for Agamemnon's commanders. Odysseus and Achilles echoed centuries of predecessors in Late Bronze Age Anatolia. Shortly before 1400
B.C.
a Greek called Attarissiya in Hittite—in Greek, perhaps Atreus—landed on the Anatolian coast. He went on a spree of war and plunder through southwest Anatolia with one hundred chariots and a force of infantrymen. Then he crossed the sea to carry out raids on Cyprus. Agamemnon's father was also called Atreus, so perhaps the men were kin. Nearly two hundred years later, ca. 1250, a Luwian general named Piyamaradu continually raided the territory of Hittite vassal kings in western Anatolia. Piyamaradu had the tacit consent and perhaps the help of a Greek royal prince in Miletus called Tawagalawa in Hittite. This Greek might have been Eteocles, a Theban prince of myth, or maybe Teucer, as Greater Ajax's brother was called.

Each of Agamemnon's generals was the leader of a band of warriors; Greek for warrior band is
laos,
a common term in Homer. The warriors were bound by strongly personal ties. We see this, for example, in Homer's emphasis on the loyalty of the Myrmidons to Achilles. Linear B tablets refer to a group of royal officials as “followers” and to the commander of the
laos
as the “man who assembles the warrior band.” This latter is, possibly,
lawagetas
in Mycenaean Greek, and some scholars think that the name Laertes, Odysseus's father, is just a contraction of that word. Whereas we, and later Greeks, tend to think of an army as an institution and war as a deployment of men and material, Homer and Bronze Age Greeks tended to think of both in personal terms. For example, the classical Greek word for army,
stratos,
means “encampment,” and for war,
polemos
means “engagement of opposing warriors or troops.” But both Homer and Linear B avoid these terms, preferring instead “warrior band” and “war spirit” or “war god” (Ares). The army that gathered at Aulis, therefore, was in a real sense, a collection of warrior bands and their chieftains.

It was also a collection of soldiers. Bronze Age documents tend to refer to the army as “the infantry and the chariotry,” but that over-simplifies. A well-equipped army around 1200
B.C.
had a variety of fighting men, including both heavy and light infantry, charioteers, archers, slingers, specialists in siege warfare (ladder men, sappers, and operators of battering rams and siege towers), scouts, spies, trumpeters, and standard-bearers. As a naval power, the Greeks also had ship's pilots, boatswains, and a variety of seamen as well as marines able to wield long pikes in sea fights.

The support personnel were not small in number. Elite positions were held by priests, diviners, physicians (who also doubled as veterinarians), scribes, and heralds. The masses were made up of carpenters, shipwrights, wainwrights, grooms, stable hands, herdsmen, butchers, cooks, wine stewards, smiths, metalworkers, tinkers, and slaves to handle tasks of every variety, from farming to sewing to maintaining latrines. There might have been a few concubines and prostitutes, but with new sources of women beckoning to the east, it might have seemed unself-confident to bring many bedmates to Aulis.

Aulis sits in the rocky hills at the foot of Mount Messapion, which rises 3,350 feet over the Gulf of Euboea. Watchmen looked down from the mountain, and one day they would light one of the chain of beacon fire messages from Mount Ida to Argos, announcing the fall of Troy. At the shoreline below, at Aulis, a Mycenaean town stood on a rocky ridge separating two harbors. Between them they made Aulis the best port in northern Boeotia, and Boeotia was the logical meeting place for the Greek fleet. The region sits midway between Mycenae, home of Agamemnon, and Phthia, home of Achilles. Boeotia was a wealthy land, rich in warriors for the Trojan expedition. And Aulis faces east, where it looked out on a three-day sail to Troy, when the wind was fair.

But the wind was famously not fair for the Greeks. Aulis was sacred to Artemis, goddess of the hunt. The royal Agamemnon was used to giving commands and thinking later; he had neither the cunning nor the patience of a good hunter. It is not surprising that he fell afoul of the deity.

Homer says nothing about the incident; in fact, he implies that it never happened. But the tale of Iphigenia is preserved in other sources. Like the other Olympians, the goddess Artemis is named in Linear B texts; more intriguing, so is a certain “priestess of the winds,” keeper of a cult that might have been important to mariners like the Greeks.

Stories differ as to how Agamemnon offended Artemis, whether by killing one of her sacred animals, by going back on a promise of a special sacrifice, or simply by bragging. The Greeks, like other Bronze Age nations, made substantial offerings to their gods, from oxen, sheep, and pigs to wine, wheat, and wool. In any case, Artemis was angry, so she kept the Greek fleet bottled up in port by making the north wind, Boreas, blow. It is not unusual for Boreas to bluster for a two-week spell in the summer. There is a powerful riptide at Aulis, which would have multiplied the effect of the wind.