The Last Full Measure (5 page)

In ancient Greek war-making there is also a contradiction seeking reconciliation. On the one hand is a heroic tradition of individual combat; and on the other, the need to subsume individuality in a corporate endeavor: the duelist and the hoplite—those who fight and die with names, and those who sacrifice themselves dutifully and anonymously. This tension is a constant in the history of warfare, seen in the knight or the samurai or the Plains Indian war chief, who must proclaim himself both through heraldic symbolism and lengthy declamations before battle in order to announce his lineage, his separateness from the mass. He proclaims his name and demands recognition. If he is killed, he at least will have died with the dignity due his station. The rest end up in a communal grave, their names lost forever, and their unreplicable
selfness
dissolved by the quicklime of the centuries.

In
The Iliad
, the Athenian general Nestor dresses down his troops: “Let no man in the pride of his horsemanship and his manhood dare to fight alone with the Trojans in front of the rest of us, neither let him give ground, since that way you will be
weaker. When the man from his own car [chariot] encounters the enemy chariots let him stab with his spear, since this is the stronger fighting. So the men before your time sacked tower and city.”
³⁶
Nestor is trying to impose a rational, controlled war making on a much older tradition that valued heroic dueling. He wanted solid results rather than beautiful gestures; the team over the individual. Nevertheless,
The Iliad
is a great paean to the heroic warrior, the man with the name—he who steps out from the multitude. The Homeric hero is eager not only to engage his peer mano a mano but also to confront and defy a potentially overwhelming mass of the enemy: two scenarios that have always been the benchmarks of the heroic in combat. For example, one of the highest acts of valor among the Kiowa and other North American Plains Indian tribes was to charge the enemy single-handedly while the rest of one’s war band was retreating. It was on a par with engaging the leading enemy warrior before general action had started, the hero isolated and unsupported, making an emphatic statement of individuality. As both of these actions carried the highest risk of being killed, they also attracted the highest kudos.
³⁷

But why? Getting yourself killed, as Nestor points out, is not necessarily best for the general cause. The explanation may well be that self-sacrificial actions are so highly valued precisely because they
can
forward the general cause. First, they may hit a spectacular tactical bull’s-eye, such as killing the enemy leader or allowing your comrades to get away. Second, the heroic mythology of the group is reinforced. With repetitions of individual acts of heroism over time, a legendary narrative is created that strengthens general military morale and makes the group a more motivated fighting force. Thus, heroism and self-sacrifice serve a quite utilitarian function and the behavior is reinforced through rewards—sometimes money, sometimes trophies and, later in history, medals—but, most important, through remembrance; and
through remembrance the hero is liberated from the engulfing darkness of anonymity. Hector, in full realization of his impending and inevitable death at the hand of Achilles, calls for just such a rescue from oblivion:

In
The Iliad
, the warrior of the Trojan War is driven by the expectations of the wider group to conform to a heroic model of individual combat, and it cannot be a one-off performance; he must display
aretai
—a combination of strength, speed, courage, and quick-wittedness—repeatedly. In the duel he reinforces his claim to
time
, or worthiness, but as Homer reminds us, it was “ruthless work”:

There is even a rejoicing in the sheer viciousness of the duel, as when Patroclus dispatches the hapless Thestor:

The manner of Thestor’s death, or rather the manner in which it is depicted, is ignominious. He is reduced to a fish, as befits a coward. But even the bravest and most noble, like Hector, may be debased in death. Achilles, his killer, “bent on outrage, on
shaming noble Hector” for having killed Achilles’ soul-brother, Patroclus:

The combat of
The Iliad
, focused on heroic champions, would certainly have been very different in reality. Death would have come in what Homer describes as “the buck-and-rush” of battle, or as the historian J. E. Lendon depicts it:

Euripides, looking back on the Homeric tradition, was also a little skeptical about the apparent clarity of heroic dueling. How did the gladiators find one another? “One thing I will not ask or I’d be laughed at: whom each of these men stood facing in the battle … When a man stands face to face with the enemy, he is barely able to see what he needs to see.”
⁴³

The Iliad
is part of an essential process to burnish combat killing and present it in a heroic form. We have had to be taught how to love war because seen unadorned it is too despicable to bear. Death in the Homeric era would have come not so much from heroic single-combat confrontations, as promoted in
The Iliad
, but more probably from a type of warfare rooted in prehistoric tribal combat. Peltasts—the hurlers of javelins and stones—would rush from the throng to deliver their missiles, and perhaps get in the occasional javelin thrust on an exposed and isolated enemy, before withdrawing into the safety of the pack. These low-risk opportunists were much more typical of archaic Greek warfare, though certainly not as heroic as duelist or phalangite and therefore not worthy of Homeric attention.
The Iliad
wants us to see the lions rather than the jackals.

In 1879 a German surgeon, H. Frölich, analyzed the wounds suffered by warriors in
The Iliad
and sorted them by weapon type, anatomical location, and relative lethality.
⁴⁴
Of course, Frölich was analyzing an epic poem in which artistic license plays a role, but nevertheless the general picture of Bronze Age warfare that emerges is revealing. The main weapons are spears, swords, arrows, and rocks (used as missiles). Frölich identifies 147 incidences of wounding, but subsequent computer analysis has identified 139, of which 105 (76 percent) were fatal.
⁴⁵
The spear was the main killer, with 99 deaths (71 percent) attributed to it. They were mainly hits to the torso (43), with head (16) and neck (10) the next most lethal areas. Although Frölich makes no distinction between thrown spears—javelins—or thrusting spears, it now
seems that more Homeric heroes died from javelin hits (54) than from spear thrusts (45), with most of them to the trunk.

The physics of the javelin and spear are very different. The javelin, which is lighter, relies on a weight/momentum relationship: Too light and it bounces off armor; too heavy and it requires more strength than most warriors could muster to be launched with any speed or accuracy. The spear, on the other hand, transfers the force of the spearman directly to the victim; all it requires is a rigid shaft and an effective spearhead for direct transmission of energy.

All bladed weapons—be they thrusting types like spears and certain swords and daggers, hacking types like axes and some swords, or missile types like arrows and javelins—employ a similar physics. The sharp point concentrates the delivered energy into a very small area for greatest possible penetration; the broader blade opens the wound for greatest possible tissue damage and blood loss. And if we look at the much broader tactical picture, we can see the same dynamic: The “physics” of attack tactics follows a similar transmission of force. The smaller, initial assault group punches the hole, and the larger follow-up force exploits the entry.

All sword wounds, arcording to Frölich’s analysis of
The Iliad
, were lethal. There are eighteen—13 percent of all fatalities. The neck was the most vulnerable area, followed by the head (decapitation is not unusual). The body blows, although fewer, are horrific and often involve disemboweling, all of which would be expected from a heavy bronze-bladed slashing sword. The Naue II sword (as archeologists designate it), with a bronze blade (broad at its base and tapering to a point, like a lanceolate leaf shape) was introduced into the eastern Mediterranean as well as western Europe and Scandinavia from northern Italy and Carpathia (the modern Czech, Slovakia, Poland area) around 1200 BCE. Perhaps brought in by northern “barbarian” mercenaries, it played an important part in the military revolution that led to the destruction of the chariot-based empires.
⁴⁶

The tensile strength of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) is greater than that of the metals used earlier, and this translated into a longer blade than its daggerlike forerunners, which in turn conferred a significant advantage on the swordsman, who became safer (because his longer blade allowed him greater distance from his foe), while being more lethal. It was a weapon design of extraordinary effectiveness, longevity, and adaptability. Although later it was made of iron, which is easier to keep sharp (although more susceptible to corrosion) than bronze, it retained its basic shape for about seven hundred years. Effectively, the sword carried into Homeric battle would not have appeared strange to the Roman legionary armed with his legendary short sword, the
gladius
.

Missile deaths other than those caused by javelins are fewest in
The Iliad:
four by arrow, four by hurled stone. The stone, of course, takes us back to the very earliest forms of hunting and combat killing and reminds us that Bronze Age warfare is perched between the prehistoric and the “modern.” Homer describes Patroclus killing Erylaus: