The Trojan War (14 page)

We should expect that in each of these cases the hero(es) received help from his men. Not even swift-footed godlike Achilles could run down a chariot by himself. But ordinary soldiers would not be much help unless they were well equipped and well trained. Leadership was key. Homer notes that the Myrmidons were divided into five battalions and the roll call of their five leaders was: two sons of gods, the third-best spearman among the Myrmidons, a minor king who had taught Achilles the art of war, and a warrior knowledgeable enough to give tips in tactics to Achilles' charioteer. They were a cut above the mere mortals named in the Linear B tablets as commanding companies of soldiers or rowers at Pylos. Unit cohesion mattered as well, and the Myrmidons were solidity itself when they took the field:

The withdrawal of such an elite group might have demoralized the rest of the Greek army. Nearly two weeks had passed since Achilles had withdrawn from the war. But Agamemnon had dreamed that Zeus had decided to give the Greeks victory. Bronze Age peoples took dreams seriously as messages from the gods, as did their descendants in the Iron Age. King Naramsin of the Sumerian epic
The Curse of Agade
(ca. 2200–2000
B.C.
), for example, saw the ruin of his city in a dream. A thousand years later, Hittite King Hattushilish III (1267–1237
B.C.
) had a dream in which the goddess Ishtar promised success in a dangerous court case, and Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203
B.C.
) received the sword of victory from the god Ptah in a dream. Seven hundred years after that, Herodotus reports how the Persian Emperor Xerxes dreamed during war councils over the planned invasion of Greece in 480
B.C.
Agamemnon was so excited that he called a council of his generals to pass on the news. They agreed that it was time to get the men into their armor and onto the field. But Agamemnon suggested a slight delay: he would call an assembly first to test the men's morale.

The men, says Homer, thronged out to assembly like a swarm of insects. The massive gathering required nine heralds to obtain quiet so that the king could speak. Agamemnon stood up. Instead of telling the army the truth, which was that he had dreamt of victory, he pretended that the game was over: Zeus had decided for defeat. The boats were in poor shape, Agamemnon said:

This sad assessment recalls the lament of a Syrian general around 1340
B.C.
, writing to his overlord, the Hittite king, from a frontier outpost on the border with Egypt:

Agamemnon pretended that the war was lost and the only sensible thing to do was to go home:

Agamemnon hoped to hear the men shout “No!” Instead, the men took him at his word and stampeded for the ships, behaving like conscripts running for their lives at the first sound of the enemy. Every army has its breaking point. The Greeks had turned into a mob—and not just the ordinary Greeks: heroes and kings ran too.

Odysseus's quick thinking saved the day. Borrowing Agamemnon's royal scepter, he ran into the multitude and restored order.

The scepter was part escutcheon and part relic. An ancient symbol, the scepter denoted kingship throughout the ancient world, for the Assyrian King Tukulti-Ninurta (1244–1208
B.C.
) as well as for Agamemnon. The scepter stood for divine approval, as Odysseus put it:

The Greeks did not make a good revolutionary mob, not least because they didn't believe in revolution. They wanted to trust their king.

Homer's account of what follows is amusing, but mutiny was serious business to Bronze Age commanders. With vicious wit Thersites expressed the misgivings that many must have felt about the king who had dishonored Greece's greatest fighting man. Thersites sneered at Agamemnon's arrogance and mocked his fellow soldiers' willingness to tolerate it:

Whether Thersites was a renegade noble, as some think, or simply a common man who was allowed to speak in the assembly, or even a traitor fomenting discontent to help the enemy, he gave voice to the longing for home felt by the ordinary Greeks at Troy. They were the ones who never got the best cuts of meat, if they got meat at all; the ones who never tasted fish; the ones who lived mainly on a diet of beans and barley, which surely left the air thick with foul odor. They washed down the food with young, unseasoned wine, rather than the fine Thracian vintages brought by ship to Agamemnon daily; they mixed their wine and water in wooden rather than silver bowls, and drank from plain pottery cups. They were usually short and wiry, often round-shouldered with bad teeth. They received less care than champion horses. No rubdowns with olive oil after a hot bath for them, no bronze tubs and no soft female hands to wash their backs. Most of their baths were in the salt sea, and they no doubt treasured the occasions when they got to take a dip in a river or a clear mountain spring. They had no perfume to offset the odors of sweat and sheepskin. They did not live in huts made of hewn fir and thatch roofs, as the heroes did. They slept in tents or in the hollow ships or outside on the shore, making it through winter as best they could by huddling around communal fires. The kings had rugs for pillows, the soldiers had leather shields. Their chairs were piles of brush and twigs covered with a goatskin throw, which did double duty as a bed—no lamb's wool rugs for them. They had no beautiful, enslaved princesses as bedmates, only quick trips to the camp whores.

They had come to Troy with one tunic each, as well as a homespun cloak and a pair of rawhide sandals—a basic pair, without the laces that made sandals fit comfortably to the foot. That is, if they were free: slaves were dressed in rags and went barefoot. And once the heroes had taken the pick of the booty, they had whatever was left along with whatever they could steal. Even so this was more than they could ever have hoped to put aside from a lifetime working the thin soil of Greece or herding another man's sheep or goats or cleaning out his pigsty.

They were oarsmen, stewards, cooks, grooms, and perhaps even farmers. They were the men who pulled the wooden chocks out from under the long ships at the moment of departure, the men who cast off the cables and hoisted the pinewood masts. They trooped into the hills to cut oak with axes made of dull bronze rather than sharp iron, gathered firewood, split kindling neatly, built and tended fires, stuffed goat intestines with blood and fat and then roasted them until they were sausage; carved meat; poured wine; gathered jugs of water from the river for drinking, for hand-washing before prayer or sacrifice and for heroes' bathing (loading them onto mules, if they were lucky, but otherwise toting the jugs themselves back to camp). They groomed the horses, dug defensive ditches, cut posts for palisades and hammered them into the ground, repitched the ships, dug trenches for latrines, cleaned the camp of animal dung. They picked up corpses, from which they had to shoo away swarms of flies, and hauled them onto the funeral pyres. They were indispensable to the expedition, but they counted for nothing in battle or council, as their betters were in the habit of telling them.

Some days they fasted until dusk because they worked so hard. A few of them talked back to their lords, like Thersites or the unnamed Trojan commoners who gainsaid Hector in the Trojan assembly, much to his annoyance. But most of them, we may suspect, were more likely to take their lord by the wrist and kiss his hand, whether out of devotion or fear. Agamemnon expected the common people to honor him like a god. Even a high-status noncombatant like Eurybates, Odysseus's herald, had to spend his days following the king and picking up the royal cloak when Odysseus dropped it. Do their job well and the men who counted for nothing could expect a pat on the back. If they were caught misbehaving they could expect a sharp blow, on the back or shoulders, with a stick.

Sometimes in the distance the Greeks could hear the sound of the dogs fighting. The wind carried the insistent, rhythmic, alternating barks and yelps of those bony beasts as they brawled over a bone, perhaps a man's bone that had been left out in the sun from some earlier engagement, or a human limb hacked off in battle. Other times, at night, when they sneaked up in a raid on a Trojan town, the men could hear the sound of prayers to the local god to deliver them from the “visitation of foreign dogs.”

Odysseus needed to turn the tide. He said to Thersites,

Odysseus showed that Thersites was not the only Greek to know how to work an audience. He threatened that if he ever again heard such cheap sniping at Agamemnon from Thersites, he would strip off Thersites' clothes. He even refers disparagingly to the sight of Thersites' genitals, which strikes a rare and vulgar note for Homer. But soldiers are not known for their delicacy, and what soldier doesn't love to see that the general is just as rough as the next fellow? To finish Thersites off, Odysseus smashed his scepter down on Thersites' back hard enough to raise a welt and to reduce the man to tears.

The audience cracked up. Better to laugh at Thersites as a buffoon than to cry at their own spinelessness. The Hittites knew the value of slapstick humor: they had festivals in which one man hit another over the head three times with a club and another where one man poured hot coals over somebody's head, all for a laugh.

Now that Odysseus had broken the mutiny with some sharp, well-chosen words, it was time to rekindle the men's bellicosity. He had the herald quiet the crowd so he could speak again. The message was brisk and simple. Honor demanded that the Greeks stay and fight. He reminded the men of Calchas's prophecy at Aulis: the war would be long but they would emerge victorious.

Stately, patriarchal Nestor had a smooth voice but when it came to war, he didn't hesitate to pour oil on a fire. He spoke next. Like Odysseus, he pointed out the favor of the gods, in the form of an omen: lightning on the right as the ships first landed at Troy, a sign of Zeus's approval of their mission. Nestor showed that he too understood psychology by offering another answer to the implicit question of “why do we fight?” He said:

Nestor also offered Agamemnon advice: he should call a muster of the entire army with the men arranged “by peoples and groups.” This as a way of judging the quality of the army. Agamemnon got up and readily agreed. He told the men to fill their bellies, sharpen their swords, prepare their armor, feed their horses, and check their chariots: they were going to war.

There was a roar of approval from the men, a rush to the huts, a series of sacrifices to the gods, and the troops got ready for the muster. Agamemnon called his most trusted lieutenants to the ritual: Nestor, Idomeneus, the two Ajaxes, Diomedes, and Odysseus; Menelaus joined them on his own initiative. After the ceremony, these leading commanders fanned out across the camp to supervise, while heralds cried for the men to muster.

They came from their huts and shelters and ships: their polished shields gleamed, their marching shook the ground, and their numbers filled the plain like flocks of cranes or swans. The Greeks rallied, which leads to a famous moment in the
Iliad,
the so-called Catalog of Ships, in which the poet lists all the captains, kings, and countries who took part in the war.