The Trojan War (6 page)

In order to appease the goddess and make the wind stop, Agamemnon is said to have coldly consented to the murder of his daughter, Iphigenia. While unverifiable, the tale is plausible. Greece's trading partners in Syria and Canaan practiced child sacrifice, especially in moments of extreme stress. Mycenaeans borrowed many customs from the Near East, as did the Minoans, and the Greek myths are full of stories of child sacrifice. Archaeology does not prove the myths true but it has found impressive circumstantial evidence.

On Crete, near the palace of Knossos, excavators discovered the bones of four children, all in perfect health. Two can be identified, by their teeth, as having been around ten years old. Their bones had been cut by knives much as animal bones are cut by a butcher's cleaver. Is this a case of cannibalism? And if so, was it part of a religious ritual? Another case comes from four miles away, on the slopes of a mountain south of Knossos, near the village of Arkhanes. Here a temple was discovered and inside were three human skeletons, two men and a woman. Some evidence, such as a bronze dagger and bone discoloration (a sign of death by blood loss), points to human sacrifice. Although not proof positive, the facts suggest human sacrifice on Bronze Age Crete. Admittedly, this evidence is Minoan and not Mycenaean, but the Mycenaeans borrowed heavily from their predecessors. Did Agamemnon?

Agamemnon desperately needed to regain the gods' favor, because he faced a problem that was as much political as meteorological. He knew as well as his men did that a good general has to have good luck. The longer the wind blew, the clearer it was that Agamemnon was unlucky. To galvanize his men and get the attention of the gods, Agamemnon might have wanted to do something bold. Enter Iphigenia.

Legend has her come from Mycenae, riding with her servants on a mule cart—a common Bronze Age conveyance—and thinking that she had been summoned to her wedding. A different kind of altar awaited her. No doubt the girl had expected the feasting, music, and dance that marked a royal wedding. Imagine her, instead, heading for the sacrificial table, white-armed, veiled, dressed in the shimmering gown of a bride, as lithe as Artemis herself, and terrified by the sight of the empty space where there should have been an animal for the slaughter. By killing his own daughter, Agamemnon gave notice of his ruthless dedication to the cause, thereby inspiring and terrifying others. Did he feel remorse as he first washed his hands, then pulled out the knife that hung by his sword scabbard, next lifted the bronze blade to his girl's throat, and finally saw the blood spurt out? Or did Artemis save Iphigenia at the last minute and substitute a deer, as some versions of the story go? All we know is that the wind stopped blowing.

And so the king of Argos and of many an isle inspected his navy. The thought may not have occurred to him, but Agamemnon was looking at one of the glories of ancient Greek civilization. It was technological, it was bloody, and it was new: it was as revolutionary in military affairs as that other Bronze Age invention, the chariot. The 1300s and 1200s were a great age of innovation at sea. The Greeks of that era were the first sea power in history on the continent of Europe. They may have picked up the know-how of shipbuilding and sailing from Aegean islanders, especially the Minoans on Crete, themselves great seafarers, but the Greeks established a navy in the harbors of the mainland and they invented a new ship: the galley.

The galley is an oared, wooden ship, built for speed, and used mainly for war or piracy. Mycenaean galleys were light and lean. The hull was narrow, as hydrodynamics dictated, and straight and low, to cut down on wind resistance and to ease beaching. A pilot stood in the stern and worked a large-bladed single steering oar. (Incidentally, Homer gets this Bronze Age detail right: in his day galleys used the double-oared rudder.) The hull was decorated with a painted set of eyes in the bows and probably also with an image of the ship's name, such as a lion, griffin, or snake. On the stem post was a figurehead in the shape of a bird's head.

The galley was so successful that its form remained standard in the Mediterranean throughout Roman times. But Bronze Age galleys lacked one refinement that marked their classical Greek and Roman descendants: the ram. The ram wasn't invented until centuries later, possibly by Homer's day. Bronze Age naval battles were decided not by ramming but by crews wielding spears, arrows, and swords and engaging the enemy either from a cautious distance or up close in a hand-to-hand free-for-
all.

The galley could be sailed, but the most reliable way to go fast was to row. The most common galley at Aulis was probably the penteconter, a fifty-oared ship about ninety feet long, with twenty-five rowers sitting along each side of the hull. At Aulis there would also have been twenty-oared ships, each with two files of ten rowers on a hull estimated at thirty-five feet long.

Bronze Age Greeks had an advantage in sea battles because of their navies and their know-how. Like today's missiles, airplanes, or tanks, the galley provided strategic mobility. As in modern warfare, the key to much of Bronze Age fighting was to “get there firstest with the mostest.” A well-run fleet allowed a king to dominate a theater of war by rapidly moving his men and materiel from place to place before the enemy did likewise.

And Mycenaean fleets were well run indeed. The king's men drafted rowers from the towns of the realm. The rowers were paid, sometimes in land allotments, and their families were looked after while they were at sea. They deserved it, because in addition to rowing, these men also doubled as marines and, once the ships landed, as infantry. If we may judge by Bronze Age Egyptian Nile boats, Greek rowers had to endure harsh discipline: in Egypt, the whip and the stick were routinely used aboard ship.

Greek kingdoms also maintained professional seamen, such as pilots and pipers (who kept time for the rowers), as well as sail weavers and other specialists. Naval architects supervised teams of skilled woodworkers in building and taking care of galleys. It took six months for a team of a dozen carpenters, supervised by an architect, to build a Bronze Age galley, as an expert estimates.

This frenzy of naval activity left the Greeks ship-crazy. They gave their sons names like “Famous Ship” and “Fine Sailing.” Linear B tablets record the names of more than five hundred rowers. Idle scribes doodled sketches of ships, while artists created more sophisticated images of the same on gems, pots, and pillars. And then there is Homer. If he composed his poems in the 700s
B.C.
, the maritime world that he describes—and describes in detail—is closer to that of the Bronze Age. The
Iliad
is an epic of land war, but sea power runs through the story like a golden thread: without it, the whole fabric of the poem would unravel.

Without the hollow ships, the Greeks could not have resupplied their army at Troy, nor raided the enemy's cities around the coast of the Troad and on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos; they never could have gone to war with Troy at all. And the watery truth about Greece, that seafaring land, is brought home again and again by the most humble reminders in the least expected places. Like this ghostly image: one of the men found on Crete, who might have been the victim of human sacrifice, was wearing a seal on a thong around his wrist, and carved into the stone was an illustration—of a ship.

There were a lot of ships and men at Aulis. But were there really 1,184 ships, the huge number cited by Homer? Or 102,000 men aboard, as calculated by Thucydides (ca. 460-397
B.C.
), the Athenian historian who was himself an admiral? And did the Trojans and their allies have 50,000 men, as Homer states?

Hardly. The Hittites had 47,500 men at the battle of Qadesh in 1274
B.C.
, which is one of the largest Bronze Age armies mentioned in historical texts. No such figures for navies survive, but the great naval power of Ugarit was said in 1187
B.C.
to have had considerably more than 150 ships. If true, then a Greek coalition around 1200 might well have mustered hundreds of ships at Aulis—but not 100,000 men. Fielding an army that big in a protracted war seems beyond the means of a Bronze Age society.

A more modest figure is in order, and here is a way to an educated guess: Troy's excavators estimate a total population for the city of 5,000–7,500 people. In preindustrial societies, typically a little more than 20 percent of the population is males of military age (18–49): so, 1,125–1,700 Trojans. Combine this with Agamemnon's statement in the
Iliad
that the Greek army greatly outnumbers the Trojan soldiers who lived in the city of Troy—in fact, the ratio is greater than ten to one. The problem is, continues Agamemnon, that the Trojans have allies at their disposal, “who knock me far off my path and keep me from capturing the well-peopled fortress of Ilion, no matter how much I want to.” On that reckoning, the Greek army was greater than 11,250–17,000 men. So a conservative estimate might calculate armies of about 15,000 men per side.

To carry 15,000 men to Troy the Greeks would have required three hundred penteconters, assuming every man rowed. Some of the ships might have been smaller than penteconters, that is, twenty-oared ships, and some might have been larger, that is, merchant vessels, so “around 300” is a plausible estimate of the number of Greek ships that left Aulis for Troy.

It is possible that the Greeks had some merchant ships at Aulis, in spite of their apparent willingness to leave trade in the hands of Canaanite ships and captains. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is suggestive of Greek priorities. When the ship sank off the southwest coast of Anatolia around 1300
B.C.
it carried everything from copper ingots to hippopotamus teeth, but only one Greek product: weaponry (two sets of spears, swords, and knives). Yet merchant ships were so well suited for transporting men, animals, and supplies that the Greeks may well have bought or built some for the Trojan expedition. A Bronze Age merchant ship could carry as many as 250 men, which is no doubt why Pharaonic Egypt used merchant ships to transport soldiers, horses, and chariots. Homer's Eumelus of Thessaly (in central Greece) brought his peerless mares to Troy, and he would surely have found a merchant ship convenient.

Perhaps merchantmen were also used to carry arms and armor as well as a limited supply of food and water. But no more than a limited supply, because ancient armies expected to live off the enemy's land. The ideal was to fare like the army of Egypt's King Thutmose III (1504–1450
B.C.
) in northern Syria. After victory, his men found fruits on the trees, grain on the threshing floors, and vats overflowing with wine. They got as drunk as at a party at home in Egypt.

Whether sobriety reigned or not, the day finally came to leave Aulis. At dawn, a favorable wind was blowing. The pitch-black hulls had been eyed and pawed and checked by hand for any holes. The gear was stowed, the horses brought on board, the fodder was found, and the men were ready. All that remained was for the chiefs to sacrifice to the gods. They set up an altar at a spring under a plane tree and led the bulls to the slaughter.

Then, when everything was done, an ill omen appeared—this one, reported in Homer. A snake crawled up the altar and onto the tree, where it found a sparrow and her eight chicks in a nest on a branch, and killed them. Then the snake turned to stone. A rational explanation of the phenomenon might be that the beast died on the spot. In any case, only Zeus could have done it: everyone knew it, and they were terrified.

It took the seer Calchas, son of Thestor, to break the spell. Imagine him wearing a long robe, with a bay-leaf wreath in his hair, and carrying a staff tied with the ribbons of the god Apollo, whom he served. He carried himself with the dignity of someone close to the gods and with the caution of the man who had given King Agamemnon the bad news that his child would have to be sacrificed.

Divination—predicting the future on the basis of natural phenomena—was common in the Bronze Age. Birds were important omens, especially in Anatolia, and so were snakes. The portent at Aulis meant, Calchas explained, that a long, hard war lay ahead. For nine years they would struggle but in the tenth, absolute victory would be their reward. The chiefs chose to accentuate the positive: final victory.

And so, at last, the chiefs boarded their vessels, and the fleet was off. The size of the expedition was extraordinary, but the act of setting sail was common. Homer describes such a scene well:

When the wind fell the men would row. They sat on benches in the long ships along two open, well-ventilated galleries, with leather screens to protect their heads, which stuck out over an open bulwark. They averaged twenty-five men on a side, and each of them pulled an oar. The men's grain was stored in leather bags; their water and wine were in clay jars or skin bottles. Their gear was under the benches. If challenged, the men would have to grab a shield, spear, and sword and take on the enemy's boarding party, but they would not be challenged: they had the greatest navy in the world.

After leaving Aulis, the sleek hulls would have passed through the channel between the Greek coast and the island of Euboea and then turned eastward, island-hopping from the Sporades to Lemnos to Imbros. From there, it took only twenty miles on the bright sea for the black ships to reach Troy.