The Trojan War (11 page)

In any case, the Trojans would not have wanted to concede the lower city without a fight, especially not after the movement of wealthy citizens there in the 1200s
B.C.
The area could survive attack because of its own fresh water from a well located in the massive Northeast Bastion. Sling stones and metal weapons have been found in the destruction debris around 1200
B.C.
of Troy VIi (formerly known as Troy VIIa). All of this may well be evidence of a failed defense. But after breaching the outer wall, the enemy would have to battle through the lower city and its maze of narrow streets. Then would come a bigger challenge: Fortress Troy.

The citadel of Troy, called Pergamos, rose about one hundred feet above the plain, a half-acre stronghold. The defenders could stockpile food and they could also rely on a supply of fresh water from an underground spring, reached via a network of manmade tunnels dug some five hundred feet into the rock.

Pergamos was protected by one of the finest fortifications in the world: a 1,150 foot circuit of walls standing about 33 feet high and more than 16 feet thick. The bottom of the wall was made of stone and stood about 20 feet high with an adobe superstructure about another 13 feet high. A walkway for the defenders crowned the walls, protected by a breastwork. The stone base of the wall sloped outward, thereby denying attackers a blind spot out of reach of a defender's arrow.

The gates were state of the art. The South Gate, probably the main entrance to the city, stood beside an enormous tower built in the 1200s
B.C.
At a height of more than thirty feet, the tower was a defender's dream. The East Gate had an entrance passage that channeled attackers into a narrow courtyard between two walls and then made them turn a sharp corner before reaching the gate itself. In the 1200s the courtyard was made at least about sixty feet longer and a massive defensive tower and a sort of foregate were added. The imposing Northeast Bastion took advantage of a natural cliff. It stood about forty feet high and was about sixty feet wide. Probably the bastion flanked a gate in the lower town's wall, just as a tower flanked the South Gate in the citadel wall.

Only a punishing and blood-spattered fight could have brought the Greeks over the top at Troy. Imagine, for example, Diomedes in the thick of battle, an angry lion, leading his crack troops in a charge to the ramparts.

The attack on the wall would have been also an assault on the senses: a combination of sights and sounds to terrify defender and attacker alike. We might imagine the twanging of bowstrings, the hum of javelins in motion, the swish of slings, the bang of missiles hitting shields that protected soldiers' backs as they climbed the scaling ladders, the crash of falling ladders, the thud of the battering ram against the doors of the gate, the grunts of the defenders as they tried to absorb the blow and hold the doors in place, the moans of the wounded, the crack of whip on horseflesh and the whinnying of the frightened beasts, the blare of the trumpet ringing out the call to one last charge, and the snapping of the city's standard as it blew in the wind above the walls. Then too, there were surely other sounds that were no less terrifying for their low volume: the pop of a breaking shield strap, the gurgling of a dying man. And imagine, through it all, Diomedes' battle cry, a bellow that came from someplace deep in his heart.

As the Greeks reached for glory and the Trojans made a stand for their homes and families, the cruel war-god, Ares, would have had his fill of victims. A lone Greek warrior might make it up to the battlements, hauling himself up the rungs of the ladder, hand over blistered hand, and then spear a Trojan defender before being stabbed to death himself. Wounded men would tumble down from the ramparts and the scaling ladders. Corpses would lie in heaps of blood, some with their hands cut off, some decapitated, some with their bellies ripped open. Flies would buzz around them in the hot sun and cluster in their mouths and ears.

And yet, the Greeks did not manage to storm the city. Troy stood firm.

I
t is probably a sunny day, but then, it usually is a sunny day on the Gulf of Edremit. Imagine the sky and sea as a cascade of light blue wildflowers, crocuses, windflowers, chicory, and bell-flowers. The meadow is an ocean of grass punctuated by islands of juniper shrubs and an elm tree for shade. Here in the shadow of woody Mount Plakos, the only sounds are the herdsman's pipe and the occasional bleating of the glossy white sheep. The cattle are too intent on eating to make a sound. There are seven herdsmen, all sons of King Eëtion of Thebes-under-Plakos, a city at the head of the gulf. They were half-brothers whose mothers were Eëtion's wives. They are not quite slumming, these princes tending the animals, since the herds are the wealth of the kingdom, but they are blessedly free of the court and its cares. We might imagine that they have nothing on their minds except horseplay, wine, and how to find willing servant girls—when suddenly, an enraged boar comes running out of the woods.

That is, it seems like a boar but in fact it is a man. Brilliant, swift-footed Achilles, the equal of the war-god Ares, is covered with bronze and carrying a shield and a giant spear of ash tipped with bronze. He is massive too, and he is coming at the boys at what seems like an impossible rate of speed. He screams something in Greek—the words are foreign but the tone is hair-raising—and throws his javelin into the nearest herdsman's neck, and then he pulls out his sword and starts slashing. It is all over before they can take cover or beg or offer ransom or fight back. Seven unarmed princes, seven corpses, and one giant, sweating and panting and smeared with his victims' blood. And he is richer by a very fine herd of cattle and sheep.

Or so Homer tells the tale. The real Achilles was no doubt accompanied on the raid by a platoon of his men, the Myrmidons, his faithful comrades who loved war and fought ferociously.

We would also expect to find Achilles' right-hand man at his side, Patroclus son of Menoetius. Patroclus played a role in the Myrmidons akin to that in the Egyptian army of the top general Horemheb, who was “Sole Companion, he who is by the feet of the lord on the battlefield on that day of killing Asiatics.” In other words, Patroclus was Achilles' chief deputy, and no mean commander in his own right. He was murderous on the battlefield but gentle off it, having learned a thing or two since boyhood, when he killed a playmate in a fit of rage during a game of dice. Later Greek writers made Achilles and Patroclus lovers, and perhaps they were, but Homer doesn't say so.

Achilles is the main character of Homer's
Iliad.
The writer focuses our attention on the alternately brooding and bloodthirsty character of the supposed ninth year of the war. But he also offers glimpses of earlier days when Achilles was less emotional, more pragmatic, and more effective.

Homer says nothing about the notorious heel. He does not mention the tale that Achilles' mother, Thetis, dipped her infant son in the River Styx and made nearly all his body invulnerable, except the heel that she held him by. Those details are probably later additions to the story. Homer's Achilles receives a lot of help from the gods but he is mortal.

Like Greece's other great generals, Achilles had an instinct for asymmetry. The Greeks fought war in two dimensions, land and sea, which encouraged them to think creatively. The Trojans acted as if the aim of their policy should be to destroy the enemy's military power. The Greeks' goal was to destroy
all
sources of support for the hostile state, including its economy and even its prestige. And Achilles was the hammer of destruction.

Achilles came from Phthia, a region in central Greece at the raw edge of Bronze Age Greek civilization. He embodied the best and the worst of the era, its talent and its violence. In all the Greek army no one could match Achilles for his looks or physique. He was tall and striking, and his handsome face was crowned with a mane of long, dirty-blond hair. Modesty was not a heroic virtue, and Achilles would have agreed. He calls himself big and beautiful, and furthermore, he says:

Achilles was temperamental, but when he was in the mood he couldn't get enough of battle. Combat was his road to what every hero wanted: fame, glory, and honor.

In what Homer calls the ninth year of the war, Achilles claimed to have destroyed no fewer than twenty-three cities, which comes to about two and one-half attacks annually. If twenty-three is an exaggeration, it is not out of line with Bronze Age hyperbole. For instance, the eastern Anatolian king Anum-Hirbi (ca. 1800
B.C.
) claims that the enemy destroyed twelve of his towns and Hittite texts record similar claims. If the Greeks had originally hoped to terrify Troy into surrender when they landed, they failed. But when Troy made its strategy of forward defense work, the Greeks employed a counterstrategy of slow strangulation. They raided Trojan territory, especially beyond the well-defended plain of Troy, and they carried out two sorts of operations: ambushes of civilians outside Troy's walls and assaults on Trojan settlements and nearby cities friendly to Troy.

The Greek camp at Troy had several functions and one of them was that of naval station: it made a convenient jumping-off place for attacks. Because they enjoyed command of the sea, the Greeks could strike the long Trojan coastline virtually at will. So they ransacked cities; carried off Trojan women, treasure, and livestock; killed some leading men, ransomed others, and sold most of the rest as slaves on the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Samos.

The Greeks were not the only sea raiders of the era. Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1382–1344
B.C.
), for example, had trouble with Shardana pirates. The Lycians of southwestern Anatolia were another group with a reputation for piracy. Amenhotep's son, pharaoh Akhenaten (1350–1334
B.C.
) was plagued by Lycian sea raiders who seized Egyptian towns year after year; Akhenaten accused a Cypriot king of providing aid and comfort to the Lycians.

Greek plundering raids, of which the
Iliad
offers many anecdotes, served several purposes. Loot was a morale booster for wavering Greek soldiers. The raids offered a break from the boredom of camp life. More important, the raids secured food and fodder for poorly supplied Greek forces. For example, Odysseus and his men stormed and sacked the city of Ismarus in Thrace, a Trojan ally. And this was just on their way home.

Livestock loomed large in the Late Bronze Age's list of booty. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Hittite texts, for instance, often list it as a coveted prize of war. Among the Greeks, raiding cattle, horses, and sheep was honorable, profitable, and violent. When Attarissiya (Atreus?) attacked the kingdom of Madduwatta in southwestern Anatolia around 1400
B.C.
he targeted cattle and sheep. Homer mentions various wars in Greece fought over cattle thieving, and it was not unusual for noblemen to die in the process. Helen's brother, for example, the Spartan prince Castor, was killed in one such raid. And cattle raiding could disrupt an enemy's economy and society. For instance, one Melanippus son of Hicetaon was a kinsman of Hector and an important figure in the town of Percote on the Dardanelles. When the Greeks came after his cattle, he prudently moved to Troy and was put up by Priam. Melanippus saved his skin and lived to fight in the Trojan army, but he was no longer a force of law and order in Percote—assuming that the town survived a visit by the Greeks.

Slaving was lucrative as well. Anatolian slaves were prized in Greece, no doubt in part because of stereotypes about slavish easterners that were common in classical Greece. But Anatolians fetched high prices in the Bronze Age for a more practical reason: in general, they were better-educated, more sophisticated, and more highly skilled than ordinary Greeks. Civilization had deeper roots in the East than in Greece; literacy was more widespread, cities more common. Myth records that Greeks imported engineers from Lycia to build the stunning fortification walls of the city of Tiryns in the Peloponnesus.

Achilles once described the attacks on the cities as a matter of “making war on other men over their women.” But he was speaking to Agamemnon then and bitter over their quarrel about a woman. Captive women feature prominently on Egyptian and Hittite booty lists as well as on Linear B tablets that inventory the wealth of Greek kings. And yet women were only a small part of the loot that the Greeks amassed.

Finally, the assaults on other cities hurt Troy, which had connections of marriage and presumably of friendship and alliance with at least some of them. Some had given Troy expensive “gifts” of gold and silver and others might have sold supplies to the beleaguered city. Of the towns that Achilles sacked, eleven were in the vicinity of Troy. Greek attacks harassed civilians and insulted Trojan honor, and they picked off vulnerable allies. Unable to lay siege to Troy, the Greeks inflicted an indirect punishment on it.

How many people—like Melanippus of Percote—left the countryside for safety behind the great city's walls? As a practical matter, only those who, like him, had family in Troy to support them, could have afforded food and shelter in the big city. Most people would probably have needed to rely on local strongholds, which lacked the security of Troy's ramparts, hoping that the Greeks did not come to their corner of the Troad. But there were surely some refugees in Troy, an excess population that could only have increased pressure on the infrastructure of the town.

Needless to say, the Greeks considered it fair game to attack any Trojan civilian who ventured out to do business, even women going to the spring to fetch water. Homer mentions two springs of the Scamander River that flowed into basins

This is reminiscent of the Canaanite
Kirta Epic
(1300s
B.C.
) in which women flee from the woods, threshing floors, springs, and fountains for shelter in the cities and towns when the enemy invades “like locusts.”

We hear nothing about Trojan counter-expeditions to defend the cities that the Greeks attacked. Either they lacked the resources to protect any place except their home territory or Homer has left out the initial details. Archaeology shows that two towns at the southern end of the Trojan Plain were fortified. They were located outside the entrance to a pass that led southward through the hills of the Mount Ida massif. Conceivably, Trojan soldiers manned these forts and sallied out to attack Greeks traveling overland. But the Greeks seem to have had no such worries farther away from Troy, on the periphery of the Troad. Taking Troy was hard work; taking Thebes-under-Plakos was a romp in the meadow.

Years after the war, King Nestor of Pylos remembered Achilles as having shone especially in the sea raids. And well he might have, since Nestor profited from one such raid on the island of Tenedos, from the spoils of which Nestor was awarded the lovely Hecamede, as hostess, servant, and bedmate. She was the daughter of a great man named Arsinous, and she had beautiful hair and divine looks.

A Roman-era collection of myths names seventeen cities that Achilles is supposed to have sacked and adds that there were “many others.” But this late source cannot be trusted. Much better to follow the
Iliad,
which specifies six of the cities sacked by Achilles: besides Thebes-under-Plakos, they were Lyrnessus and Pedasus, both in the Troad; and Lesbos, Tenedos, Scyros: all islands, and presumably the main town is meant in each instance, as Homer specifies in the case of Scyros. On the east coast of Lesbos, excavation turned up a Bronze Age city at Thermi that was violently destroyed in the 1200s. Each of the islands supplied a beautiful woman to one of the Greek heroes: in addition to Nestor's Hecamede, there were Iphis, a Scyrian woman who slept with Patroclus, and Diomede daughter of Phorbas of Lesbos, who slept with Achilles (at least in the absence of his favorite female, Briseis). Among the many trophies in Agamemnon's collection were seven beautiful women from Lesbos.

It is a good guess that the weapons used in the attacks on the islands were naval pikes, which the Greeks carried on their ships for sea battles. These were long spears, allegedly forty feet, jointed by iron rings, and tipped with bronze points. Naval battles in the Bronze Age are not well documented, but it is clear that they were mainly attacks on personnel rather than attempts to destroy ships. This is suggested by recently discovered, fragmentary images from Greek vases of the 1100s
B.C.

Perhaps the earliest recorded naval battle took place between Hittite and Cypriot ships during the reign of the Hittite King Shuppiluliuma II (1207–?
B.C.
). But no details survive: around the same time, ca. 1187, there was a battle between Egyptian ships and those of the Sea Peoples and it is well illustrated on a sculpted Egyptian relief. Both sides' vessels carry archers and marines armed with pikes, swords, and shields. The prows of the Sea Peoples' ships have posts ending in duckbill-shaped projections, and these may have served as a kind of ram. The Egyptians are supported by archers on shore as well. A different source, Minoan and Mycenaean images of sieges, shows ships approaching fortified cities and men drowning, presumably battle casualties.

On the mainland, Lyrnessus and Pedasus were taken on the same operation as Thebes-under-Plakos. The order in which the cities were attacked is not known. None of the sites has been securely identified, but Homer does supply some hints, so it is an educated guess that all three cities were on the northern shore of the Gulf of Edremit.