The subject of this discussion is night battles and night expeditions in the Trojan story. Night battles in general are an actual historical phenomenon, as well as an idea in the imaginary apparatus. But they turn out to have particular significance in the Trojan material, which culminates in the final night battle in which Troy itself is captured. It is worth looking beyond Greek material and this discussion also addresses the tenth parvan of the Mahābhārata, and, in so doing, raises some questions about the heroic code. Bringing all this together, we can adopt the perspective of those who sit in the Wooden Horse, like those others in history who sat quietly in ambushes, awaiting the signal with trepidation.
According to Thucydides (7.44.1), there was only one night battle of any significance in the Peloponnesian War. This was when the Athenian general Demosthenes tried to capture the fort Epipolai outside Syracuse. There was a bright moon, but that was not enough to allow recognition of others: the Athenians were in serious trouble and the obvious device of asking for a watchword, a synthema, was less simple than it seemed. They were unnerved by the sensory excesses of battle cries and paians: ‘l’obscurité est amplificatrice du bruit, ... elle est résonance,’ as Durand once said, paraphrasing Bachelard.1 The result was that many of the Athenians became disoriented and lost.
A night battle (nyktomachia) is more than just a statement of circumstances: it is a genre, and indeed a chapter in the notional manual of warcraft. Origen tells us that the στρατιώτης γενναῖος (the ‘good soldier’) knows how to νυκτομαχεῖν, τειχομαχεῖν, πεζομαχεῖν, ναυμαχεῖν, καὶ τοξεύειν, καὶ δόρυ σείειν (‘to do fighting by night, on walls, on foot, on shipboard, to shoot arrows and to shake the spear’).2 However, the night battle, like fighting during the winter season, is a very rare choice by military leaders; and the examples of it in Greek literature are correspondingly few. The one instance so described3 in Herodotos (1.74), if it should not be deleted, refers to the effects of an eclipse rather than a real night battle; if genuine, however, it is the first instance in Greek literature and is not newly coined.4 It is part of the imaginaire but not at all a common occurrence. There are no instances at all of the word in Xenophon, Polybios, or Diodoros. In Cassius Dio, there is only one case (36.48), where Pompey employs night battle against Mithridates.
Night battles are therefore, like lions, a powerful idea rather than something of which Greeks have actual experience. And in Thucydides’ ekphrasis we can see the imaginaire at work: it shows the same sophistic creativity that he displays in the celebrated scene of the paradoxical sea/land-battle in the harbor. When discussing a night battle, it is obligatory also to discuss the state of the moon. One might think that in principle the moon must shine, otherwise the battle is not possible at all. Yet it can be obscured intermittently by cloud and mist, as at Polyaenus, Strategemata 6.5.1 (Aratos and the Akrokorinth). Indeed, an attack can be made when it has not yet risen, as Pompey did in the case of Mithridates, to stop the latter from escaping; only later did the moon rise, to the premature cheers of Mithridates’ army (Dio 36.49.6).
Decisions on battle are always undertaken for reasons. But those reasons need to be particularly compelling to justify night battle. Demosthenes (Thuc. 7.43.2) realized that he would be seen climbing up to Epipolai during the day. Night battle was therefore the only possibility, a disastrous decision as it turned out. Pompey too was ‘forced’ into the position of attacking Mithridates by night: τότε γὰρ εἰδὼς αὐτοὺς διαφεύγειν μέλλοντας ἠναγκάσθη νυκτομαχῆσαι (‘at that stage, realizing that they were on the point of getting away, he was compelled to do night battle,’ Dio 36.48.3). In this context a negative example is illuminating: Agrippa, facing the Pompeian fleet in the Civil War, was ready for a night battle, but his troops were not and he was persuaded not to pursue the idea (Appian, Civil Wars 5.108).
The example of Demosthenes illustrates how night is thought to be a great ally in gaining an unassailable site. Possibly the most celebrated historical example is Aratos’ capture of the Akrokorinth.5 He learned about a path through a cleft in the rock that led up to a point where the walls were not especially high. He proceeded up this path at night (like the Persians at Thermopylai), under so bright a moon that he worried about reflections of the moonlight from the armor. But the moon dims and brightens at various points to assist him in his capture of the citadel.
To sum up, then, night battle is very special and only undertaken when one is faced by especially insurmountable difficulty. The moon illuminates the night battle, if available, but the faintness of its light leads to problems in recognizing people or finding one’s bearings: the dangers are of killing friends or becoming lost.
Turning from night battles to night expeditions, we can observe that these do not figure, e.g., in the Theban cycle. But they do figure in the Trojan cycle, in items (2) and (3) of the following set of incidents:
What relationship do these scenes bear to each other? Though they vary in intensity and significance, they can be viewed at the least as sharing common ground and indeed common personnel. From the perspective of oral poetry, these are implementations of a particular type of incident, whose special character is enhanced by the deployment of night in (2) and (3): they require a particular personal bravery, and the ability to deceive.
The first incident, Odysseus the spy, is the hardest to understand. Apollodoros (Epit. 5.13) merges this incident with the incident of the Palladion. Rather similarly Gantz,6 trying to preserve their autonomy, argues, rather like one of the new mythographers of the 1st centuries BC and AD, that Odysseus may only have learned from Helen that it was necessary to steal the Palladion and that he needed backup, in the form of Diomedes, to pull off the theft. The fundamental question, though, is surely: what is the connection between the Wooden Horse and Odysseus’ expedition? Was Helen, in some version, the necessary collaborator inside the city? Was Odysseus going in some way to make arrangements for the reception of the Horse? Or is there no connection and was it just a pleasing piece of bardish opportunism for Odysseus to meet Helen, while professedly bringing back ‘lots of intelligence’ (Od. 4.258)?
The Palladion episode is much more purposeful: the key statue is removed from Troy, an incident rather reminiscent of the beliefs behind the Roman ritual of evocation.7 At the same time, one must admit a certain redundancy, or reinforcement, of motifs in the epic tradition: what was the key to capturing Troy? was it the arrival of Philoktetes, or of Neoptolemos, or the death of Troilos, or the killing of Rhesos, or the removal of the Palladion?
Of these three episodes the Doloneia displays the weakest individual motivation, partly because it seems to be dependent on the other two incidents. It is an inversion of the first incident—trying to gain intelligence because the Trojans are victorious! And maybe, as Cirio (2003) has argued, it involves stealing horses rather than imposing a wooden one. But it also calls for the personnel of the second incident, namely Diomedes and Odysseus, and it must surely recall the theft of the Palladion. Like so much of the Iliad, it foreshadows later events.8 The analysts and neoanalysts are surprisingly reticent about making this point, presumably because of the inclination to dismiss the Doloneia altogether. But we can see it in the mind of von der Mühll,9 who even suggests that the σύν τε δύ’ ἐρχομένω lines (‘when two go together,’ Iliad 10.224 f.) might have come from the earlier story.
Duals like this are, however, rather interesting, serving as they do on their occasional appearances in this story, to underline the harmony of purpose and the commendable degree of cooperation between the two heroes in the Dolo- neia. This makes strange reading in the light of some things said about the expedition to steal the Palladion. The proverbial expression, Διομήδειοςἀνάγκη (‘Diomedean compulsion’), which appears at Plato, Republic 493d, is explained by reference to an incident when Diomedes and Odysseus fall out on the return from Troy, a scene that figured in the Ilias Parva (F11 West). Odysseus, for some reason, tries to kill Diomedes by creeping up on him from behind, but Diomedes sees the shadow of his sword in the moonlight, and ties him up, forcing him to march forward by beating his back with the sword. Conon (FGrH 26 F1.34) gives the reason: Diomedes had been helped over the wall by Odysseus, but then left him behind, stealing the Palladion himself; when Diomedes returns, Odysseus nearly kills him but then merely drives him (Odysseus in this version driving Diomedes) into the camp.
The deceptive power of night stretches, then, to conflict between the two comrades, only one of whom (Diomedes) seems to be due, for cult reasons,10 to end up owning the statue—and his is the special relationship with Athena in the Doloneia, not Odysseus’s. It looks as though the Doloneia sets up a deliberate dissonance with the Palladion story. It is a shame only that it takes no advantage of the night setting—unlike the shadow of the weapon in the Palladion story or the reflections that Aratos feared. Apart from the fact that others are sleeping, the story might as well be happening in full daylight.
In a final act of deception, Troy is captured by night. The themes therefore of the night escapade and of the night battle, come together for a final nyktoma- chia, the word with which Pausanias describes it (10.26.8, cf. 10.18.4).
The difficulty of taking Troy leads to a desperate solution, comparable to Demosthenes’ motives for the night battle at Epipolai. It involves a stratagem, noted by Polyaenus 1.pr.8, and indeed Polyaenus even constructs a later capture of Ilion rewriting the Trojan Horse motif. There can be little doubt that the Wooden Horse does stand as an icon for military stratagem, however unrealistic it may be in itself. The trickery of the Horse is then doubled by the fact of the night attack: it is for good reason that the word νύκτωρ (‘by night’) occurs 99 times in Polyaenus’ Strategems—about once every 140 words, probably the most frequent use of the word in Greek literature.
The moon too plays an interesting role in this event. According to Lesches in the Ilias Parva: νὺξ μὲν ἔην μέσση, λαμπρὰ δ’ἐπέτελλε σελήνη (‘it was midnight and the moon was rising brightly’). The moon rises at midnight on the 8th of the waning moon, the 23rd of the month, when it has reached its last quarter. What Vergil meant by amica silentia lunae (‘the friendly silence of the moon,’ Aeneid 2.255) is unclear,11 but it looks as though the prevalent view in Greece, on the basis of which writers from Damastes onward12 calculated the date of the fall of Troy, was that the night was dark until the battle took place, when it became sufficiently illuminated for the battle to be possible. The ships sail toward Sinon’s signal through the dark: like Pompey, the Greek fleet had taken advantage of the period before moonrise. But once the battle begins, lighting conditions have reverted to the norm for a Thucydidean νυκτομαχία, light enough to see there is someone there but not to know who it is.
It is only in Vergil that disguise is needed, by Trojans at that—to confuse a Greek called Androgeos (2.371), his name strangely borrowed from a son of Minos. In Lesches the danger lies more in not recognizing others: Odysseus fortunately recognizes a wounded guest-friend, Helikaon, a son of Antenor, and gets him safely out of the way in a scene depicted by Polygnotos in the Cnidian Lesche at Delphi.13 But this is not wholly a night battle and indeed there is something very odd about the expression of Pausanias, ‘the battle that the Trojans fought in the night’ (τὴν μάχην ... ἣν ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ἐμαχέσαντο οἱΤρῶες, Paus. 10.27.5): it was not exactly a μάχη—they were taken by surprise, in their sleep, and the object of the Greeks was a slaughter like that of the companions of Rhesos. Proclus’ summary of the Ilioupersis notes (arg. 2): καὶ πολλοὺς ἀνελόντες τὴν πόλιν κατὰ κράτος λαμβάνουσι—‘killing many, they took the city by force.’ Somewhere between midnight and dawn, we are to imagine, the menfolk are killed, the city looted and the women and children collected as slaves. The brutality is that of Melos and in fact it is nearer a night slaughter than a night battle. It is only a matter of a few hours.
The three Trojan night escapades, and indeed the capture of Troy, all involve Diomedes and/or Odysseus. But they are part of a wider pattern too. The same implicit trickery is found in ambush incidents. Odysseus ambushes Helenos and learns he must bring back Philoktetes as a result (Ilias Parva arg. 2). And Achilles too is not beyond isolated acts of enterprise. When and why did Achilles ambush Troilos?14 Earlier, the capture of Lykaon, as Cirio observes (2003: 184), took place on a night expedition—Lykaon is seized from his father’s orchard by an Achilles ἐννύχιος προμολών (‘coming forth by night,’ Iliad 21.36–7).
And if Melos leaves a bad taste in modern mouths, should Troy also? Did Greeks not feel it was an excess? Certainly, Aeschylus could choose to depict it that way in the Agamemnon. And what did the poet of the Doloneia mean by putting the following words into Diomedes’ thoughts?
Αὐτὰρ ὃ μερμήριζε μένων ὅ τι κύντατον ἕρδοι,
ἢ ὅ γε δίφρον ἑλών, ὅθι ποικίλα τεύχε’ ἔκειτο,
ῥυμοῦ ἐξερύοι ἢ ἐκφέροι ὑψόσ’ ἀείρας,
ἦ ἔτι τῶν πλεόνων Θρῃκῶν ἀπὸ θυμὸν ἕλοιτο.But he stayed back and pondered what the nastiest thing was he
—seize the chariot, where the glittering armor lay,
and heave it off by its yoke-pole—or lift it high and carry it off
—or take away the life of yet more Thracians ...(Iliad 10.503–6)
The interesting word is κύντατον (‘most doggish,’ i.e., nastiest), which on its own would be a term of extreme disgust and moral disapprobation. But, focalized through Diomedes, it appears to be a commendable act of villainy in a situation where values are inverted. And herein lies the problem. Is any of this ‘heroic’? Is Martin Nagler justified in speaking of ‘the disgraceful conduct exhibited by Odysseus and Diomedes’ that blots the sense of heroism of the Doloneia?15 Before we answer this question, we need to look at a different world, where values, or at least official values, are clearer.
Book 10 of the Mahābhārata is the Sauptikaparvan or ‘book of (the attack during) sleep.’ It is translated by W. J. Johnson as ‘The Massacre at Night.’ In fact it is the first half of this book, also entitled Sauptika, that deals with this incident.
The episode focuses on the wrath and shame (10.1.32) of the hero Aśvatthāman, son of Droṇa, the great trainer of warriors on both sides—a sort of human Cheiron. Aśvatthāman is one of the last three surviving warriors on the side of the Kauravas, all the rest now killed by the victorious Pāndavas, the heroes (in the modern sense) of the epic. So incensed is Aśvatthāman that he determines to kill the Pāndavas as they sleep, despite the urging and advice of the Brahmin Kṛpa, now talking like Phoinix to Achilles. Followed by his two colleagues, Aśvatthāman advances to the gate of the enemy camp. Two adhyāyas (chapters 6–7) are now visibly intruded16 in which he is confronted by a demonic projection of Śiva causing him to reflect on his guilt in proceeding to this action. Then, improving intrusion over, he leaves his colleagues at the gate to kill all those who attempt to escape and sets about the killing of the sleepers, starting with the king Dhṛṣṭadyumna. The entire army, no less, is slain by these three warriors.
The Mahābhārata is an intensely moral and religious work and must, from the perspective of Indo-European epic, be regarded as overlaying its inherited materials with a new and far-reaching religiosity. The intruded passage serves to magnify this overlay. Here Aśvatthāman recognizes that he is about to violate śāstra, the code of precepts, a sort of fās in Roman terms:
Bypassing the precepts of śāstra completely,
He desires to kill those who should not be killed,
And, falling from the ordained path, sets foot
Upon an evil road.
For a man should not bear weapons against cattle,
Against Brahmins or kings, against a woman,
A friend, his mother, his teacher, the old,
Against children, the moronic, the blind,
Against the sleeping and those rising from sleep ...
(Mahābhārata 10.6.20–2, tr. W. J. Johnson)
And there is a similar prescription in the Laws of Manu, which altogether is a statement of śāstra for kings:
90. When he is engaged in battle, he must never slay his enemies with weapons that are treacherous,17 barbed, or laced with poison, or whose tips are ablaze with fire.91. He must never slay a man standing on the ground,18 an effeminate man, a man with joined palms, a man with loose hair, a seated man, a man declaring ‘I am yours,’92. a sleeping man, a man without his armour, a naked man, a man without his weapons, a non-fighting spectator, a man engaging someone else,93. a man with damaged weapons, a man in distress, a badly wounded man, a frightened man, or a man who has turned tail—recalling the Law followed by good people. (Laws of Manu 7.90–3, tr. Patrick Olivelle)
κατὰ τῶν ἀόπλων ἐκ φύσεως19 (‘sword-bearing against those who are by nature unarmed’)—this is something that denudes him of his heroism, and it is also ἐπιβουλὴ καὶ νυκτομαχία (‘plot and night battle’). Similarly, when Achilles rejects the ‘joined palms’ of Lykaon, naked and without armor (21.50) we should perhaps raise an eyebrow and view it as part of the barbarous rage of Achilles in this area of the epic. What Achilles wants to do is kill the entire Trojan race (21.102–3), rather like Aśvatthāman and the Pāndava army.
The night battle is also not a pitched battle for which both sides prepare, but an attempt to gain the advantage by surprise. One of the advantages is to attack your enemy before they have had a chance to get armed,20 which is scarcely heroic and is understandably condemned by the Laws of Manu (above).
Trojan night is an inherent part of the tradition and Aśvatthāman’s massacre of the sleeping Pāndavas could quite probably go back to an Indo-European tradition of telling of night attacks. It would be interesting to know of other epics that tell such stories. Perhaps one should count the attack of Grendel on Hrothgar and his men as they sleep in Beowulf.
εἰ γὰρ νῦν παρὰ νηυσὶ λεγοίμεθα πάντες ἄριστοι
ἐς λόχον, ἔνθα μάλιστ’ ἀρετὴ διαείδεται ἀνδρῶν,
ἔνθ’ ὅ τε δειλὸς ἀνὴρ ὅς τ’ ἄλκιμος ἐξεφαάνθη·
τοῦ μὲν γάρ τε κακοῦ τρέπεται χρὼς ἄλλυδις ἄλλῃ,
οὐδέ οἱ ἀτρέμας ἧσθαι ἐρητύετ’ ἐν φρεσὶ θυμός,
ἀλλὰ μετοκλάζει καὶ ἐπ’ ἀμφοτέρους πόδας ἵζει,
ἐν δέ τέ οἱ κραδίη μεγάλα στέρνοισι πατάσσει
κῆρας ὀϊομένῳ, πάταγος δέ τε γίγνετ’ ὀδόντων·
τοῦ δ’ ἀγαθοῦ οὔτ’ ἂρ τρέπεται χρὼς οὔτέ τι λίην
ταρβεῖ, ἐπειδὰν πρῶτον ἐσίζηται λόχον ἀνδρῶν,
ἀρᾶται δὲ τάχιστα μιγήμεναι ἐν δαῒ λυγρῇ·
If only all we best people might be collected alongside the ships
for an ambush, where the excellence of men is best identified,
where the coward and the mighty man are revealed:
for the worthless man’s skin changes color here and there,
nor does his spirit in his breast endure so that he may sit still;
he sits shifting from one foot to another
and the heart in his chest pounds greatly
as he sees his doom, and his teeth chatter;
but the good man’s skin never changes nor is he much
afraid when first he has taken his place amidst the ambush of men,
and he prays to get involved as soon as possible in the baneful
slaughter. (Iliad 13.276–86)
The lochos, with its requirement to endure stressful anticipation in silence, shows the real mettle of a warrior. This is what the likes of Odysseus and Diomedes knew as they sat in the Horse in the dark of night, waiting for the moon to rise and the slaughter to begin.
1. Durand, G. Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire 11 (Paris, 1992): 99.2. Commentary on Job 2.10 (Migne, PG 17 col. 64).3. I refer in these statements to nyktomach- words only.4. The verb, νυκτομαχεῖν, does not appear before Appian and must be a Hellenistic classifying conceptualization.5. Plutarch, Aratos 18–22; Polyaenus, Strat. 6.5.6. Gantz, T. Early Greek Myth (Baltimore & London, 1993): 642.7. Wissowa, G. Religion und Kultus der Römer 2 (Munich, 1912): 383 f., cf. Pliny, HN 28.4.18 (inobpugnationibus ante omnia solitum a Romanis sacerdotibus evocari deum, cuius in tutela id oppidum esset, promittique illi eundem aut ampliorem apud Romanos cultum).
8. See Dowden, K. “Homer’s Sense of Text,” JHS 116 (1996): 47–61.9. von der Mühll, P. Kritisches Hypomnema zur Ilias (Basel, 1952): 186 f.10. Callimachus, Hymn 5.33–42, with scholion to line 1; Burkert,W. “Byzyge und Palladion,” ZRGG 22 (1970): 356–68.11. There is merit in the article of R.V. Cram, “On a verse in Vergil Aeneid II.255 and the post-Homeric tradition concerning the capture of Troy,” CPhil 31 (1936): 253–9.12. F7 Fowler, FGrH 5 F7 = Plutarch, Camillus 19.7.13. Lesches, Ilias Parva F22 West.14. Gantz, Early Greek Myth: 597–602.15. Nagler, M. N. Spontaneity and Tradition (Berkeley & London, 1974): 136.16. Compare 10.6.1 with 10.8.1.17. E.g., concealed in a wooden casing (note of Olivelle, translation of George Bühler in Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25).18. Because the king fights from a chariot.19. Anon., On the eight parts of rhetorical speech 3.606.20. Cf. Polyaenus, Strat. 4.9.2: δείσας, μὴ τῆς ὁπλίσεως τῶν στρατιωτῶν ὀξυτέρα τῶν πολεμίων ἡ ἔφοδος γένοιτο.
Cirio, Amalia M. “Le livre X de l’ Iliade.” Gaia 7 (2003): 183–88. Gernet, L. “Dolon le loup,” in L.Gernet,Anthropologie de la Grèce antique. Paris, 1982.Haft, A. J. “The City-Sacker Odysseus in Iliad 2 and 10.” TAPA 120 (1990): 37–56.Johnson, W. J., tr. The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahābhārata: The Massacre at Night. Oxford, 1998.Olivelle, P., tr. The Law Code of Manu. Oxford, 2004.Vidal-Naquet, P. The Black Hunter. Baltimore & London, 1986.