Troy and Warfare in Archaic Greece
On the rocky, sun-drenched shores of Phtia, Odysseus makes a final bid for Achilles to accompany the Greek invasion of Troy: ‘This war will never be forgotten, nor will the heroes who fight in it.’ Of course the movie Troy cleverly fulfils its own prediction, retelling Homer’s epic thousands of years later. In doing so, the film also raises some interesting questions about its relation to Homer and Homer’s relation to historical Greek warfare. The movie claims in the opening to be inspired by Homer, the master Greek poet of the Archaic Age. He composed the epic Iliad about the ninth year of a great war between Greeks and Trojans. He was a poet, however, not a historian in any sense of the term. Nor was he the creator of these stories. Rather he was a bard in a long tradition of bards passing down oral stories of heroes in song and poem, generation after generation. Homer achieved lasting fame, however, by committing these stories to writing in his epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ostensibly, his poems are set in the Late Bronze Age, the period when the Mycenaean Greek culture flourished in mainland Greece and the Aegean (c. 2200–1150 BC). The Iliad and Odyssey, however, have sparked a long debate of their own, ever since ancient times: do they give more than a superficial treatment to the Mycenaean Greeks, a civilization that collapsed centuries before his birth? And if not, what historical period might Homer’s works actually describe? Unlike the other movies considered in this book, therefore, Troy poses a doubly complicated set of questions: How effectively does the film represent Homer’s Iliad, and what period of warfare did Homer’s Iliad represent?
Investigating this problem requires a brief survey of Greek history. The earliest Greeks – by which are meant speakers of Greek – migrated from West Asia to the Balkan Peninsula late in the third millennium. These Greeks, more than 1,000 years before the Athenians built their famous Parthenon, developed a culture historians call Mycenaean, a label based on the name of one of the leading palace complexes of the age, Mycenae. The Mycenaean Greeks were politically organized into small kingdoms centred on places like Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos. Each small kingdom had a central palace and citadel complex that served, among other purposes, as a great redistribution centre for the produce and crafted goods of the countryside. The Mycenaeans developed the first form of written Greek, and developed a thriving trade with other powers in the Eastern Mediterranean like the Egyptians and Hittites. They also practised a great deal of what amounts to piracy, raiding the shipping and settlements of neighbours somewhat regularly. For reasons that are not fully understood but were likely quite unpleasant, the Mycenaean kingdoms collapsed between 1250 and 1150 BC. By Homer’s day, which was probably around 700 BC, the Mycenaean palaces were ancient ruins, palatial no more.1
In the aftermath of the Mycenaean collapse, both mainland and island Greece entered a Dark Age, so called because all written evidence for mainland Greece has disappeared, along with a substantial amount of archaeological evidence. Eventually, over the course of a few centuries whatever had caused the Mycenaeans to fall seems to no longer have been a factor, for in many of the little pockets of fertile land in between the mountains of rocky Greece, new communities formed with a new sense of political organization. An increase in archaeological remains from the early eighth century demonstrates that the Greeks entered a period of growth and revitalization historians call the Archaic Period. These small communities developed into the uniquely Greek form of city state called the polis. Homer was born in this period, somewhere round about 700 BC. He took advantage of – or personally initiated – the use of a written alphabet to record Greek compositions and composed his two epics. The Iliad, which is most important for studying ancient warfare, described the events from a few weeks during the ninth year of a war that was supposed to have, according to tradition, lasted for a decade.
Hence the knotty problem. For centuries, many assumed that the world Homer described, with poetic embellishment, was that of Mycenaean Greece, the Bronze Age (c. 2200–1150 BC). In some respects Homer seems to describe a Bronze Age culture – a culture of heroes from long before his day, armed and armoured with bronze. Accordingly when he talks of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek host, as the king of Mycenae, and describes weapons and armour of bronze, in addition to war-chariots, it appears as if he is describing Mycenaean warfare and civilization from centuries before his day.
If Homer did mean to set the Iliad in the days of the warrior kings of Mycenaean Greece, however, he had very little way to access that world directly. Brushing up on Mycenaean history by reading historical accounts was out of the question. Though Homer may not have been blind as later Greek traditions asserted, he lived at a time when the very knowledge of writing had disappeared from Greece. Today we are so tied to written texts as major sources of information that it might seem, at first glance, that the Mycenaean world was closed to Homer. That bard, however, lived in an oral culture. Without the crutch that writing provides for failing memories, oral cultures were capable of preserving cultural memories intact in their rough forms for centuries, perhaps even the five or so between Homer and the last gasps of the Mycenaean civilization. Homer may well have seen remnants of Mycenaean civilization in the form of armour and weapons left over from the Bronze Age as dedications to the gods in their temples. He may have received from his predecessors elements of an oral tradition from the late Bronze Age.2
There are significant problems, however, with assuming the Iliad in any way directly reflects Mycenaean warfare in the late Bronze Age. Though oral traditions can pass on through centuries, it simply appears impossible to suppose that Homer could have accurately described in detail a world that had disappeared half a millennium before. A much stronger case can be made that the Iliad reflects the Greece of Homer’s day, or perhaps that of his grandparents. The logic runs like this: Homer’s poems came from a long developed tradition about the Greek heroes of old. So the subject matter of the Iliad was believed by all to be ancient. Homer knew nothing substantial about truly ancient warfare, i.e. that of the Mycenaeans. What he did, then, is describe the oldest warfare he knew, which, so it is argued, would be somewhere within a century before his birth, the tales his grandparents passed down. To make the poem authentically ancient sounding (since again, these heroes were supposed to be ancient), he added some Mycenaean touches to apply a patina of venerable age to his descriptions of war and society from his own day. So, he put the epic tales together in ways that made sense to him based on what he had heard or seen. Whenever fitting, he added a reference to something antique to remind listeners of the purported antiquity of his story. So, for example, he refers to a helmet made out of scales of sliced boar’s tusks of which a Mycenaean example has been recovered by archaeologists.
If one looks at his language carefully, some clear trends appear. First, Homer describes the armour, from helmets and shields to cuirasses and greaves, as made of bronze. He describes shields generally as round, crafted of hide and bronze, and made with a central boss and handgrip. A few times he refers to round shields that seem more like the hoplite shields of the later seventh century. Taken together, this sort of equipment seems to have existed for only a short period in Greek history, about 25 years to either side of 700 BC.3 It stands to reason, then, that the historical system of warfare modelled in the Iliad was actually somewhere close to Homer’s own day, about 700 BC.
Like Homer, Troy, the film, makes its own blend of various times and places. Indeed the set designer for Troy conceded readily that he mashed up several different civilizations to get the ultimate desired look for Troy.4 In some cases the influence is not so much from a particular historical period as it is from a Hollywood archetype. To give one major example, the city of Troy itself, historian Peter Green notes, is not representative of the Bronze Age city as we know it from archaeology. Instead it is mired in stereotypical and fairly unhistorical cinematic representations of ancient cities that are themselves products of some unhistorical nineteenth century world views. This did not escape Green’s notice when he concluded,
Despite all the computerized facilities for the creation of virtual reality at his disposal – including a faithful, and highly realistic, reconstruction of Troy made for the archaeologist Manfred Korffmann’s Troia Projekt – Petersen’s Troy follows the same old formula, if on a lavish scale. He gets the external batter walls right (though he makes them over twice their real height), but inside we have the familiar mish-mash of vaguely Egyptian-looking temples, anachronistic artwork (Hittite, Egyptian New Kingdom, Greek Archaic, fifth century Athenian, etc.), underfurnished public courts and a superfluity of empty platforms.5
So not only is the Iliad largely unhelpful for understanding Mycenaean warfare, Troy does not fare well in this regard either. Instead, to the extent that it draws from Homer, the best candidate for the period of warfare Troy represents is the Archaic period of Greece.
Considering the film as a model of Archaic Greek battle, however, enables us to ignore some important but historically suspect features of the film. The first, the depiction of a pseudo-historical Bronze Age city itself, is not too difficult to ignore when exploring Archaic Greek combat. The conflict represented in Troy, just as in the Iliad, is not fundamentally a siege; there are no siege works, no siege engines, no mining and countermining. Instead it is a series of pitched battles for the fate of a city. The second element to ignore is the massive size of the forces. Troy is based on an epic after all, and in this epic 1,000 ships and some 50,000 men came to take the precious city. These are figures that were beyond the capacity of Archaic Greek cities to muster. Nor can one be too concerned about whether the names of the heroes represent specific historical figures. So, to put a fine point on it, leaving out questions of architecture, army size, and the precise historical identity of any particular person named in the film, does Troy’s model of combat, the arms and armour, troops and tactics, duels and deaths, represent anything like the warfare of the Iliad and of Archaic Greece?
The Iliad’s Model of Archaic Combat
To answer this it is important to establish what is known about battle in Homer’s age, the late eighth century. The Mycenaeans, following the trends of older civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Egyptians, Hittites, and Mesopotamians, used chariots as an important combat arm. While the terrain in Greece was decidedly unfriendly to horses, Mycenaean palace records indicate that some of the kingdoms had as many as several hundred war chariots at their disposal. How exactly these chariots were employed on the battlefield and their importance relative to infantry are still matters of significant debate for historians. What seems clear, however, is that chariots were used not for charges into masses of infantry or for head-on collisions with other chariots, but as mobile platforms from which archers and javelin throwers could launch their missiles against enemy infantry with relative impunity. So we might imagine an ancient battle in the Late Bronze Age consisting of masses of infantry with chariots serving as a mobile arm to attack the flanks and rear of the infantry.6
As Mycenaean civilization collapsed, this seems to have changed. Based on the archaeological finds of weapons and armour, and images of warriors on pottery and reliefs, the Greeks and their eastern Mediterranean neighbours shifted away from chariots and instead focused on infantry as the most significant combat arm. These infantry, in Greece, became better armoured than before, wearing short corselets of leather or linen reinforced with strips of metal or metal scales. A new type of shield also appeared. The shields of the earlier Mycenaean period were of the tower kind – long, rectangular or figure-8 shields that protected most of the body. Now smaller, round shields developed that had a single central boss and handgrip and a shallow conical shape from boss to rim.7 Warriors equipped something like this are depicted on a single instance of a Mycenaean pot, the so-called Warrior Krater from the beginning of the twelfth century (see plate 1).8 A single row of soldiers marches along on the vase, each armed uniformly with a corselet and open-faced helmet topped with a pair of horns. Their shields are not quite round but instead somewhat crescent shaped. This pot is Mycenaean, however, and while it gives the flavour of the kind of armour that may have been employed in the Archaic period, it is very difficult to say whether Mycenaean styles of arms and armour persisted after their civilization collapsed.
Another source of evidence for arms and armour in the Archaic period is the Iliad itself. If anything, the poem indicates that the equipment in any particular Greek army would vary widely. Some warriors would use thrusting spears, others javelins, still others swords. Even axes are referred to upon occasion. Slings and bows and arrows have their place, too, though Homer clearly believed them to be morally suspect weapons compared to the up-close and personal swords and spears. As for protection, some warriors wore armour, others none. Shields, when they are described tend to have these characteristics: they were round, made of hide and/or bronze, sometimes reinforced by one or more wooden staves across the back, and had a central boss. These references to central bosses suggest that warriors held these shields out in front of them using a central grip.9 Some references seem to suggest different kinds of shields existed, longer rectangular or oval shields. Certainly, the variety in armour and weapons would suggest that similar variety existed for shields.
So, how did these soldiers fight? Any answer to this must ground itself in Homer, our only writing that touches on this shadowy period in Greek history. Hans Van Wees, who has written at length about battle in the Homeric Age, considers warfare in the historical period described by the Iliad as fundamentally similar to that practised by New Guinea’s Dani warriors:
Depending on his personal preference, a man is armed with spears or bows and arrows. The spearmen carry long, finely crafted stabbing spears and often a couple of cruder short spears which they can throw at an enemy … Men also carry tobacco nets for times of rest behind the front lines … At first a few men run towards the enemy, who are still far beyond arrow range. For a few minutes they shout taunts … wave their weapons and then retire. Some of the enemy reciprocate. Gradually the lines get closer together and soon they are within firing range of each other. … Men move up from the rear, stay to fight for a while, and then drop back for a rest. Those in the front, in the most vulnerable positions, must keep in constant movement to avoid presenting too easy a target. As men dance up to the front, they can take care of themselves. As they drop back, though, they have a blind side and many wounds are received then. … Spearmen and archers work together, with the idea that the bowmen will bring someone down with an arrow so that he can be killed with a spear … The front continually fluctuates moving backwards and forwards as one side or the other mounts a charge.
As the early afternoon wears on, the pace of battle develops into a steady series of brief clashes and relatively long interruptions. An average day’s fighting will consist of ten to twenty clashes between the opposing forces.10
According to Van Wees, most of the warriors in the film are spaced 5m or more away from their comrades, a loose open formation. He also notes clashes were short-lived, no more than 15 minutes long, and no more than a third of the warriors engaged in these clashes at any one time.11
Van Wees essentially adopts this display of Dani combat as a model of Archaic Greek combat. And so, following the model, a historical Ajax would taunt a Hector into a confrontation, throwing spears. If the challenge was accepted the two would close to duel. Their conflict soon brought a gathering of each hero’s nearby allies to the forming knot of men. A more sustained combat broke out between these pods of warriors, but not for long. Then the warriors would dissipate again into their loose, open formation. The phenomena of warriors clustering and dispersing would happen up and down the lines simultaneously. Any significant massing of troops, correspondingly, would happen sporadically and through spontaneous generation rather than any orchestration by a commander.
This model of fluid combat seems to characterize appropriately a number of scenes described in the Iliad. There are many occasions, however, when Homer refers to both armies clashing and fighting as a whole, something that would, it seems, rarely if ever happen in the heroic model above. Take this example from the Iliad:
The armies massing … crowding thick-and-fast as the swarms of flies seething over the shepherds’ stalls in the first spring days when the buckets flood with milk – so many long-haired Achaeans swarmed across the plain to confront the Trojans, fired to smash their lines. The armies grouping now – as seasoned goatherds split their wide-ranging flocks into packs with ease when herds have mixed together down the pasture: so the captains formed their tight platoons, detaching right and left, moving up for action.12
Diagram of van Wees’ Model: Heroes (H) initiate a duel, their nearby comrades (*) clump around them and fight, then all disperse.
Clearly Homer does refer to the common soldiers here in ways that suggest they were organized, fought in lines, and were integral to the battle.13 A second example of units fighting collectively comes from a passage where Nestor gives advice to Agamemnon at a certain point in the fighting:
But you, my King, be on your guard yourself. Come, listen well to another man. Here’s some advice, not to be tossed aside, and I will tell it clearly. Range your men by tribes, even by clans, Agamemnon, so clan fights by the side of clan, tribe by tribe. Fight this way, if the Argives still obey you, then you can see which captain is a coward, which contingent too, and which is loyal, brave, since they will fight in separate formations of their own.14
Here seems to be a reference to the whole army in action, organized in regular formations that encompass all of the warriors in the army. This suggests the possibility for Homeric warriors to organize themselves more than the heroic model seems to suggest. It is important to be clear on this point. The heroic model Van Wees offers has significant value for understanding Homeric combat. The question is simply one of degree: how organized and collectively could and did Homeric warriors fight when they chose to do so? These passages suggest the warriors could and did work together in organized formations at times. Still, it is not the case that everyone in these armies was engaged in direct combat at all times. Of course, as is the case in any massive crowd, there would have been those at the front and in the fighting and those farther back and currently out of the fighting. Second, none of these passages, despite their hints at grouping and teamwork, suggests that the infantry fought in well-defined formations, organized into even clean ranks and files. It is simply to suggest that the armies were organized so that commoners fought too, not just heroes, and they did at times engage their opponents as armies, en masse, not only as sporadic clusters of duelists.
Certainly, Homeric warfare was a loosely organized affair. The armies arrived and occupied the battlefield. Each noble brought along with him a retinue of fighters, his subordinates. To this extent there was a vague sense of unit organization. Unlike later Greek warfare, however, there were seemingly no ordered formations, no ranks or files. The collective mass of troops on both sides moved closer, perhaps just out of range of a spear cast. Then came the series of mini-battles. All along the battlefield the bravest fighters, the promachoi as they were called, stood in the very front. Any warrior desiring to keep his reputation, or noble wishing to be distinguished by more than birth alone, stood among the promachoi. These fighters on both sides would clash along the battle front. One would hit another with a spear cast or even run forward to attack a foe in hand-to-hand combat.
In the transitional period between Homeric warfare and the development of the Archaic phalanx these armies of clumps and individuals begin to coalesce. Tight and orderly formations of rank-and-file were not yet enforced. Still, there grew a collective sense that hand-to-hand combat was superior to other forms and that fighting together side-by-side in a unified formation was the most effective way to do that. Since the development of this attitude was evolutionary, not revolutionary, slingers, archers, and javelin throwers continued to fight alongside the heavy infantry, taking advantage of their comrades’ shields to dart in and out for a quick strike against the foe. The heavy infantry, for their part, slowly adopted a concave shield with a characteristic elbow strap and hand grip on the rim. Alongside this shield, they began to insist upon teamwork. This meant attacking the enemy in formation and defending against the enemy in formation.15
So what did this look like? At the very least the front rows of fighters would be engaged more often than not. Depending on how loosely units were formed, fighters in the first few rows behind that might engage collectively with the enemy. Without strictly ordered formations and clearly defined lines, however, it must have been relatively easy, and common for that matter, for spaces and pockets to appear between the opposing front lines and dissolve organically as soldiers successively attacked and defended, pressed forward and fell back. These spaces and pockets allowed for heroes to duel as the Iliad suggests they did, while still being backed by their comrades-in-arms.
Troy’s Cinematic Model of Combat
Now back to the film. How closely does Troy represent this sort of Archaic Greek battle? Let’s begin with each force’s arms and armour. The Trojan forces, certainly, are too uniform in their armour and weapons to reflect a historical Archaic army. Curved rectangular shields that protect their bearers from neck to ankle are found in three standardized varieties. Some sport four bosses near the corners. Others are smooth with a cutout on the soldier’s right, the better to allow him to thrust a spear at his foe. An oval shield completes the options for director Petersen’s Trojans. They all look fundamentally of the same make – which would, perhaps, make sense for a Bronze Age kingdom’s standing army, but not for the citizen militia of Archaic Greece. The armour of each soldier in the ranks is completely uniform. For head protection, the soldiers have open-faced helmets that flare out at the bottom into neck protectors and have nasal guards. Armour corselets protect their torsos. These are crafted of sturdy linen, perhaps, or leather. The material is reinforced with metal plates and decorated with etchings. This armour certainly could have existed in some place and time, but its uniformity, if anything, is out of place for an Archaic army. Indeed with the exception of the shield types, the Trojan army approximates fairly well the soldiers painted on the Warrior Krater (see plate 1). But neither Troy nor the Warrior Krater capture the variety of warriors with different weapons and equipment that should be gathered under the army’s banners. The main weapon of the infantry is a thrusting spear with a broad, bronze, leafshaped head. There are no inter-mixed troop types, no slingers, no javelineers; the archers are actually separated from the infantry. The film version of the Trojan army, in short, has little to recommend it as a representation of Archaic Greek soldiers.
The Greek infantry are armoured similarly to the Trojans as far as functionality. Their armour is much less ornate, however. The Greek cuirass in Troy consists of bands of metal or leather connected to one another with smaller shoulder bands. Oddly enough, their armour is similar to that crafted on a bronze (see plate 16) of an Italian soldier from the much later Roman Empire. In addition to this, each warrior also wears a tunic covered by a skirt of leather pteruges to guard their lower abdomen and upper thighs. Like the Trojans, each Greek warrior appears to be wearing essentially the same armour – a standardization that, again, fits the Warrior Krater, but not Archaic Greece. The Greek shields, however, show more variety. Many are round with a central grip, appropriately Homeric. The shields are of bronze and some are decorated with simple concentric circles and bosses. Others have a rounded, pie-shaped cutout, while others are in the shape of the rounded crescents found on the Warrior Krater. Still others are of the figure eight variety, which resembles the body of a violin, oval with cutouts in the centre. None are highly decorated. Here the film presents a reasonable approximation of the Archaic Greek shields. That is about the whole of it, however. Like their Trojan adversaries, each Greek soldier has a sturdy thrusting spear and there is none of the variety in weapons that there should be, no javelins, slings, or bows.
What about the depiction of combat itself? Troy offers its most elaborate sequencing in its spectacular staging of the first major battle. The Trojan forces are arrayed outside their city, clad in their essentially uniform style. Every so often one can see a standard bearer carrying a pole with a shield mounted on it. In later periods of Greco-Roman warfare such standard bearers would serve to rally soldiers and to guide them in a formation as they manoeuvred. These Greeks, however, do not have any clear organization of rank and file that would suggest the need for such standards. At the head of the host rides Agamemnon (Brian Cox) in his chariot, wearing a more ornate corselet of leather with riveted metal plates highlighted in gold and silver, not wholly unlike that of the Trojan lords. He is accompanied by the other Greek lords also in chariots: Menelaus, Odysseus, Ajax, and so on. The Trojan army stands amassed in front of its city, waiting.
But there is hope that perhaps only one man might die that day. Paris (Orlando Bloom) and his brother Hector (Eric Bana), mounted on horses at the front of the Trojan host, wait for the Greek army. Paris hopes to duel Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) and, in doing so, bring the war to an end. Menelaus is game enough and accepts the challenge. Up to this point the scene has roughly followed the third book of the Iliad. Here, however, the screenwriters must veer widely off the path Homer trod because the film has pointedly eliminated the gods from the narrative. Paris, dominated by the bear Menelaus, is no longer rescued by Aphrodite, but crawls back in defeat, wounded, to his brother Hector. Hector, rather than watching his brother die at his knees, slays Menelaus. Enraged by the seeming treachery of Hector, Agamemnon orders the Greek host forward into battle. Led by their chariot-borne warlords, the Greek infantry trot into battle on the double-quick. They move as a mass but without any particular order – something we should expect of an Archaic army.
This part of the scene is significant for those imagining ancient battle. The run is uncontrolled, each man running at his own pace. The faster and more confident warriors quickly outstrip the slower-paced, and the mass of soldiers develops gaps in its front. This is a dynamic of any mass of people, even horses for that matter; if a conscious effort is not made to stay in a formation, the group will quickly lose cohesion. It is difficult enough in any period and place to get infantry to stand and march in an orderly fashion of uniform ranks and files, let alone attack while maintaining such an orderly formation. The warriors in Troy as we might expect, do not have such orderly formations, and the dangers of their running attack are illustrated. Simply put, the front runners will reach the enemy unsupported by their comrades, a dangerous position in which to be. Meanwhile the Trojans stand in orderly rows, tower shields planted firmly on the ground and spears thrust forward to receive the charge. The discipline of the Trojan infantry stands in stark contrast to the Greek warriors who run at their foe in a mob.
That’s Not How He Died in Homer!
A number of heroes meet different deaths in the ancient sources than they do in the film:
• Menelaus and Paris duel in the third book of the Iliad and Paris certainly is bested. His patron goddess, Aphrodite, rescues him and Menelaus goes unscathed, living through the war and returning home with Helen. Since Petersen intended to craft a Trojan war without gods, however, this will not do. His plot: Hector intervenes to save his brother and slays Menelaus.
• Achilles dies during the war, writers many centuries after Homer wrote. During one assault, he fights his way into the city gates and is shot in the heel with a poisoned arrow by Paris. The assault is ended and the Greeks do not yet take Troy. In the cinematic version, Achilles is one of those who sneak into the walls of Troy using the wooden horse. He finds Briseis as Troy is falling, kills Agamemnon to stop him from harming her, pledges his love, then dies.
• Homer’s Agamemmnon survives Troy, while the cinematic version dies during the sacking of the city. His return to Myceneae, however, is far from triumphant. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, we learn that his wife, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover. The two murder Agamemnon in his bathtub.
And then, the impact. Peterson shifts the camera to a high angle following shot along the front lines to capture the collisions of the soldiers. The foremost Greek warriors smash into the Trojan shields, sometimes breaking into the lines, other times dropping dead from a spear thrust. Spears and shields fly up into the air as the Greeks try to break the Trojan formation through the force of their impact. The camera moves down the front, surveying the devastating collisions. Chaotic knots of men fighting one another form along the front lines of the Trojan ranks. The Trojans attempt to maintain their formations while the Greeks simply pour into their ranks as they are able. This too represents what must have been a natural outcome of a less organized infantry formation charging a body of infantry standing still and in formation. The latter work their way into the ranks of the former; how deeply depended on the space of the gaps between men.
This epic collision in Troy draws directly from a simile Homer employed:
As a heavy surf assaults some roaring coast, piling breaker on breaker whipped by the West Wind, about on the open sea a crest first rears its head then pounds down on the shore with hoarse rumbling thunder and in come more shouldering crests, arching up and breaking against some rocky spit, exploding salt foam to the skies so wave on wave they came, Achaean battalions ceaseless, surging on to war.
At last the armies clashed at one strategic point, they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss, and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath, Fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood. Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains, Swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
Flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge,
And miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the hunger,
So from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war.16
Though it appears that the majority of the Trojan army remains in its formation, the entire front line has become of a mass of men struggling in what amounts to a brawl.
This sort of entropy that drove warriors to abandon formations and focus on themselves, and made lines of warriors devolve into scattered pairs of duelists, may have been common in more organized armies. In loosely ordered armies like those of Archaic Greece, scenes like this fighting in Troy may well have occurred frequently. Odysseus calls for the men to reform their lines – ironic since they really have had none. Hector, on the other hand, bellows for the more organized Trojans to push collectively against the Greek forces. Just so; there is ample evidence that a more organized force pushing against a disorganized force could rout it.17
Homeric Wounds
Though Petersen’s film is by no means free of violence, the depictions of violence tend to be far tamer than the scenes described by Homer. The poet took great pains to describe in detail those strokes that took a man’s life. Achilles inflicts on Demoleon one of the more gruesome deaths of the Iliad. ‘He stabbed his temple and cleft his helmet’s cheekpiece. None of the bronze plate could hold it – boring through the metal and skull. The bronze spearpoint pounded, Demoleon’s brains splattered all inside his casque.’ (20.449–54, Fagles trans)
The cameras return to the front line brawls. Close-up shots of swords stabbing and spears thrusting are punctuated by shots of archers drawing bowstrings to ears, then wider shots of the front line. Shields are used to bludgeon opponents, soldiers stumble in the mess. The scene is chaotic. It is difficult to get a sense of who is who and what progress, if any, is being made along the frontlines. The representation of ancient Archaic battles as chaotic, brutal, messy affairs in the zone of hand-to-hand combat is well promoted. Really the call of the commanders for action is the problematic part of the scene, being inconsistent as it is with the disorganization of the melee. It is not clear at all how their voices would be heard above the din or how, for that matter, the troops would even be able to disengage and reform. As for the standard bearers, they seem to have disappeared. Whether this is reasonably authentic or not depends on how well organized the initial forces were and the emphasis the armies put on staying in formation. Given what has been posited for Greek armies of the period, this scene seems credible as a model of how a battle evolved – or rather devolved – from a charge to a mixing mass of men in the front lines.
Thus the cinematic battle moves on as the cameras shift from the clash in the front line to a pocket of space occupied by the mighty Greek, Ajax (Tyler Mane). Armed with a tower shield and a massive war hammer, he lays flat Trojans all about him. Hector sees the damage Ajax is dealing, charges to meet him, and is knocked from his horse by a mighty blow from Ajax’s shield. As the two duel in a small open space, the battle continues all around. Though knocked about by Ajax, Hector manages to dispatch him with a spear thrust to the abdomen. The duel won, the Trojans all about cheer for his triumph. Anything like this kind of duel required spaces in the battle to appear here and there, and thus the scene captures this aspect of Archaic warfare well.
Next Hector shouts for the Trojans to push. They lean into their shields and push collectively. Slowly the disorganized Greek combatants are pushed back. Then the lead ranks of the Trojans cast their spears at the Greeks, draw their swords and rush them. As the melee continues we see Hector in the fray killing his opponents. The archers continue their attack and ultimately Agamemnon must order the retreat or risk losing his entire army. The Greeks turn and run, stepping over their dead comrades, driven on by the Trojans at their back. The victorious Trojans drive them to their beachhead where the tables are turned as they come within range of the Greek archers. The victory, however, is with the Trojans. Hector recalls the troops and sends an emissary to the Greeks to allow them to bury their dead.
Really in both epic and film these are matters of emphasis: heroic stories require heroes and heroes are expected to stand out by their behaviour from the backdrop of ordinary people and behaviours. This is what our model of Archaic Greek battle supposes and this style of combat is precisely what Petersen’s Troy illustrates well. For the most part the Greek forces fight in masses as a collective army but not in any particularly orderly formation. The Trojans, for their part, are more organized and able to close shields and give the massed shove that in the later days of phalanx warfare was called the othismos. In the absence of orderly rows and columns of soldiers (the Trojan push not withstanding) there was often considerable space on the battlefield for the promachoi, the heroes, to engage in duels. The duel between Ajax and Hector is not an unreasonable representation of this as far as its staging in the battle. Sadly though for fans of Ajax’s war hammer, we have little if any evidence of such a weapon in use on Greek battlefields. Swords and spears, javelins, slings, and arrows, yes; two-handed war mauls, no.
Troy also follows in Homer’s footsteps in presenting a series of special duels both in and outside normal battles. Some of these duels take place formally before battle or during a pause in the battle. The duel between Paris and Menelaus is one example. Troy itself opens with another special duel. The army of Agamemnon has been busily unifying Greece through war and they have reached the borders of a reluctant Thessaly. An arrangement is reached by the two kings that the outcome of a single duel to the death will determine the victor, thereby sparing unnecessary bloodshed. The agreement made, Agamemnon’s soldiers shout the name of their hero, ‘Achilles.’ Arriving late after a night of women and wine, Achilles is reprimanded by Agamemnon. Ever proud, he turns to quit the battle, suggesting that Agamemnon can damn well fight his own battles, but the words of the wise Nestor hold him back: ‘Achilles, look at the men’s faces. You can save hundreds of them. You can end this war with a swing of your sword. Let them go home to their wives.’ Achilles turns back to the battle field and strides toward Boagrius.
It is over almost before it has begun. The lines of two armies mark off a field and Achilles strides coldly toward Boagrius, sword and shield in hand. The latter bolsters his courage by leading the Thessalian troops in a battle cry. Turning to the approaching Achilles, Boagrius casts one of his two javelins at the Greek hero. Achilles calmly catches the shaft in his shield, casts the shield aside, and quickens into a run. Achilles easily dodges the second spear, and the two warriors are almost within arms’ length. Boagrius draws his sword, ready for the clash of steel that never comes. Leaping into the air in a seemingly superhuman burst of power and grace, Achilles strikes down into the left shoulder of his enemy, piercing home in a mortal blow too fast for the crowds of warriors to see. As Achilles strides toward the Thessalian army to find another challenger, Boagrius drops to his knees, a corpse before he hits the ground. The King of Thessaly surrenders his royal sceptre to Achilles and the war is over.
In both this duel and that between Paris and Menelaus, the outcome of the duel is to determine the outcome of the war. It is difficult to say historically whether such arrangements happened and how common they may have been. On the one hand the ability to conclude a war with limited bloodshed might be appealing to some. Putting everything into a single duel of champions, however, was pretty risky. There are parallels in other ancient cultures, accounts of duels that were supposedly arranged to determine the outcome of a battle. The account given in the Book of Samuel about David and Goliath falls under these parameters.18 The Romans too cherished a story about the Horatii, three brothers that fought the three brothers from Alba Longa, the Curiatii to determine which of the two cities should rule the other.19 These too are of unclear authenticity.
What is reasonably certain, however, is that warriors in the Archaic period, those concerned with having an extraordinary reputation, sought public displays of their valour. Winning a duel with a distinguished enemy was the paramount way to achieve this. And so Hector slew giant Ajax on the battlefield. Later in the film, Patroclus, pretending to be Achilles, leads the Myrmidons to rally the hard-pressed Greeks. Patroclus and his men cut a swathe through the Trojan ranks until Hector checks him. The two duel in a circle as the armies stop and watch. Soon Patroclus is slain, his throat cut by Hector’s blade. Of course this will lead to Hector’s death in the edge-of-one’s seat martial dance that is the duel between Hector and Achilles. Indeed if the Iliad emphasizes anything, it is the frequency of clashes between outstanding warriors. As historian J.E. Lendon notes of the Iliad:
It happens again and again: a major hero encounters a minor hero of the enemy. The minor hero is introduced, and then the minor hero is slain, often with a gory anatomical description of the killing … The encounter between two warriors can be much elaborated. Upon meeting, opposing warriors may exchange threats – ‘here you will meet your doom!’ – defiances – ‘bragging ox!’ – and boastful genealogies. The introduction of the victim and his death are often adorned with epic similes, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful … Yet the one-on-one fighting can also be stripped of all adornment and reduced to a mere list of the slain.20
Rather than being a sideshow to the plot in the Iliad, the duels, with their naming of the heroes are a critical point in the poem, pointing to an ethic in the Archaic age that one should publicly demonstrate one’s martial bravery to be worthy of honour. These heroic duels are part and parcel of the loosely organized nature of Homeric armies. In a system where individuals are expected to stand out from their peers and win or die through their own skill, where combat is conceived and described as being fundamentally reducible to a series of duels, it is not surprising at all that armies consisted of heroic leaders and their retinues, and a significant amount of the fighting took place between the leaders, the promachoi. This is a feature of Archaic warfare that Troy captures very well.
So, how does Troy, the film, fare on the take-away test? Though not without a significant share of errors in setting and in some aspects of equipment, Troy offers some reasonable models of Archaic combat. A movie-goer who never investigated any other evidence or accounts of Archaic battle would get a not unreasonable portrayal of some of the main combat mechanics. Heroes are at the centre of it all. Whether duelling one-on-one or leading their retinue into battle, they are the catalysts that drive the armies to clash in battle. As they seek out the most dangerous foes their comrades clash beside and around them in loose formations that can disintegrate into swirling masses of men. This sort of battle, which Troy captures fairly well, is a far cry from the form of warfare the Greeks developed later in the age: the hoplite phalanx. It is to this type of battle that we shall now turn.