THE HOMERIC WORLD IN WAR
On the fringe of the horizon, in Homer's day as in our own, always hung
the cloud of war. In war, men were as cruel as they have usually been.
A successful siege of a city involved the slaying of its defenders, and
the carrying away of the women, "to make another's bed, and draw water
from another's well." Hector, when the broken oaths of the duel[1] make
it certain that Troy must perish, looks for no better fortune to befall
Andromache; may the earth be mounded above him before that day!
Though a truce is granted for the cremation and burial, with one common
cairn, of the men who fall in a great battle,[2] it is not Achilles
alone who would fain refuse burial, and rest in the House of Hades,
to an enemy. Hector intends to give the body of Patroclus to the dogs
of Troy, and to fix his head on the palisade above the wall.[3] The
fury of Achilles, when he learns from Iris the intentions of Hector,
has thus more excuse than is usually supposed. Homer himself found
such deeds in the tradition; and though he regards them with horror,
he cannot expurgate them. The insults lavished by Achilles on the
dead Hector are ἀεικέα ἔργα, deeds of shame.[4] But the deeds of
Hector would have been as shameful. The treatment of Hector was not
sensational enough for the refined taste of the Athenian tragedians.
Sophocles and Euripides make Achilles drag the wounded but living
Hector.[5]
The tragedians here followed a tradition that was not Homer's; it
may have come, Mr. Murray suggests, from the lost Cyclic poem _Iliou
Persis_, the _Sack of Ilios_. The Cyclic poets of 750-650 B.C. are in
all ways more superstitious and barbarous than Homer; theirs is the
taste of a later age than his, and, as we shall see, they are usually
followed by the Athenian tragedians. They preferred the "sensational"
and the "harrowing," and did not shrink, in the _Andromache_, as in
the Ionian _Sack of Ilios_, from the brutal murder of Hector's child,
Astyanax. Homer's men are never child-murderers. City sackings were
as cruel as those of Cromwell in Ireland, of Monk in Dundee; our own
dealings with Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo are more recent examples,
and these were towns of our allies. But Homer's men do not, like the
Assyrians, torture prisoners of war; such captives were starved,
tortured, and literally caged, to extract ransom, during our Hundred
Years' War with France; as Cromwell's prisoners, after Dunbar, were
starved in Durham Cathedral. In Homer, ransom is sometimes accepted,
in the earlier days of the siege. Achilles, especially, took ransoms
and was merciful. Contrast the ferocity of Agamemnon, who refuses
quarter, and slays a man to whom Menelaus was giving quarter.[6]
Agamemnon actually cuts off the hands and head of one foe, and throws
the head into the throng! He desires that not even the male child
in the womb may escape! (_Iliad_, vi. 56-60). There are chivalrous
passages, as when Hector and Aias exchange gifts after an indecisive
passage of arms, and when Diomede and Glaucus recognise their ancestral
friendship; but there are plenty of cases in which victors exult with
cruel humour over their fallen foes, in the spirit of Arthur in
Layamon's _Brut_. (1200 A.D.).
The dead, except in the case of Eetion on whom Achilles had ruth, were
always stripped of arms and armour, if the victors were not impeded.
The hut of Idomeneus held many such Trojan spoils. There are hints
of a custom of tearing the tunics, or chitons,[7] but they are vague
and unimportant. No doubt the act, when performed, was intended as an
insult, but it is only alluded to twice or thrice: in one case the
tunic is "of bronze," answering to the current term _χαλκοχίτωνες_,
"bronze-clad."[8] The case is obscure.
_A la guerre comme à la guerre_. The morals of war in Homer are not
unlike those of war everywhere in the matter of "atrocities." The siege
operations were very inefficient. The Achaeans were not able to invest
Troy, and they never dreamed of an escalade. Without a scaling-ladder
Patroclus "thrice clomb on the corner of the lofty wall," and was only
thrust back by Apollo.[9] But scaling-ladders are never mentioned; a
night attack is never contemplated. The famous Wooden Horse is the
only hint of an approach under a wooden cover on wheels (the mediaeval
"Sow"); and if it was anything of that sort, Homer did not understand
its nature. The efficient fighting in the open was done by chariotry
(the owners usually dismounted and fought in line or column); as in
most ancient oriental countries, Scotland in Roman times, and Ireland
in the Late Celtic period, perhaps as late as 300 a.d., also in early
Britain. By the date of the Black Figure vases (sixth century B.C.)
and in seventh century art, the painters often introduce mounted men:
the "late poets" abstained from doing so, it appears, except the late
unspeakable _Stümper_ of the Doloneia, according to Reichel.
The tactics, as far as we can make a coherent picture of them, were
peculiar, but not unexampled.
At the beginning of a pitched battle the knights (owners of chariots)
dismounted, and formed a thick and serried line of infantry: behind
them came the nameless host, concerning whose armour we have no
information. The light-armed archers and slingers showered their
missiles, and the combat might last for hours. At "the break of the
battle," when one side had broken the enemy's line, the victors pursued
either on foot, or, more generally, in their chariots which had been
stationed behind them in the close combat; while the vanquished leaped
into their chariots and fled, save the brave who retired face to the
foe. After the break in the battle, the individual exploits of the
mounted knights, the chariotry, fill the picture, till the beaten
forces reach the wall of the Greek camp, or of Troy, when a rally
occurs, followed by another battle in ordered ranks.[10]
As to the armour and weapons, Homer represents every man-at-arms as
wearing a helmet, usually of bronze; and a huge shield, very long, like
the three sorts of shield represented in Aegean art on the Mycenaean
dagger blade showing lion hunters. Some shields in this art are in
form like the figure 8, they belly out, and protect a man from neck to
ankles. Others are merely doors, flat and oblong, of the same size;
others are equally large, cylindrical, and partly protect the sides.
All are hung from the shoulder by baldrics, not held in the hand,
like the parrying bucklers of the eighth century and later. Homer thus
describes such huge shields as these of Aegean art, with baldrics; but
his language not infrequently conveys the impression that some shields
are circular; indeed, it is only by wrenching the sense of the Greek
that any other meaning can be obtained. The details are considered
later; meanwhile Homer's shields are neither those of the Dipylon
period nor of archaic Greek art, and in their size and their baldrics
correspond to those of Aegean representations. The substance of the
shields is layers of ox's hide, covered with a plating of bronze.
Warriors also wear corslet, metal girdle, and metal-plated kirtle: the
corslet was thin, and could be pierced by arrows. The greaves to cover
the shins were probably of bronze, laced up with wire, as in a pair
from Enkomi in Cyprus, of the Age of Bronze, now in the British Museum.
No thigh pieces are mentioned, though they are commonly shown in the
art of the seventh to sixth centuries.[11]
For offensive weapons the men-at-arms use two spears with heavy heads
of bronze, these are usually thrown; and a sword of bronze, commonly
a heavy cut and thrust blade (never the long Elizabethan rapier of an
earlier Minoan time), with a handle of ivory, inlaid or studded with
gold or silver, in some cases. The sheath is similarly decorated. Only
once do we hear of a battle-axe of bronze; and the dirk, sometimes of
iron, is never said to be used in battle. These weapons have analogues
in certain swords and daggers found in Aegean graves.
Archery is not so highly considered as when "the man Heracles" and
the great Eurytus were bowmen. Odysseus, the heir of the mighty bow
of Eurytus, left it at home, and fought as a heavy-armed footman.
Pandarus, on the other hand, left his horses and chariots at home, and
came to Troy trusting in his bow.[12] Teucer, Pandarus, Paris, and
occasionally Meriones, are the bowmen, among the princes, and Paris
and Pandarus are taunted for their weak and cowardly missiles; honour
was to be won with sword and spear. The Scots archers, in the same
way, were always anxious to come to hand-strokes with their sperths,
or battle-axes; the Highlanders threw down their muskets, after one
discharge, and went in with the claymore; the French never reconciled
themselves to the long bow; the Spartans despised it. This was the
Homeric sentiment: the bow was scarcely the weapon for a hero. The
arrow-heads were of bronze.[13] In Mycenaean graves at Kakovotos (Old
Pylos) in Elis, the stone arrow points are of very fine neolithic
work.[14] When archery declined yet lower, in historic times, the
round or oval parrying buckler, carried on the left arm, came in, as a
protection against spears and sword-strokes. This parrying buckler does
not appear in Homer: efforts made to discover it are unsuccessful.
Thus Homer describes a given stage in the art of war: his pictures are
not patchworks of "Mycenaean" fighting (about which we know nothing),
and of civic Greek fighting in the age of civic heavy-armed foot.
[1] Iliad, iii. iv.
[2] vii. 332-420.
[3] xviii. 175-177.
[4] Ferdiad, in the Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, also drags a dead man
by his chariot wheels.
[5] _R.G.E._ p. 118. _Ajax_, 1031. Euripides, _Andromache_, 399.
[6] _Iliad_, vi. 37-65, xi. 122-147.
[7] _Iliad_, xi. 100, ii. 416.
[8] _Ibid._ xiii. 439, 440. That the bronze tunic is a softening of
the sense by a late interpolator is not very likely, for Homer, we
have seen, represents a warrior as cutting off a dead man's hands and
head; and if he does not shirk this, if no later hand corrects him, why
should he strain at tearing a chiton? Miss Stawell ingeniously remarks
that the chiton-tearing is a proof of the prevalent use of corslet? If
men fought without corslets, the chiton "must always have been getting
torn in the mêlée, whatever the warrior's fate. But the sign would have
been unmistakable if the tunic was usually covered by the corslet and
could not be torn until that was taken off...." (_Homer and the Iliad_,
p. 211). But, I fear, Homeric warriors did not come to such close
quarters as at Rugby football.
[9] _Iliad_, xvi. 702, 703.
[10] See "Homeric Tactics."
[11] For details and discussion, see "Homeric Armour and Costume."
[12] Iliad, v. 193-205.
[13] On stone and bronze arrow-heads, see Tsountas and Manatt, p. 209.
[14] Kurt Müller, _Alt Pyhs_, p. 292. _Attische Mitteilungen_, 1909.
Cf. plate xv.