But skeptics there were (the late Sir Moses Finley among them) and their doubts soon proved to be well grounded. The tablets were for the most part inventory lists: quantities of olives, spices, wheat, records of land leases, registers of personnel, reserves of chariots, some of them recorded as broken. They are the day-to-day ledger entries of a bureaucratic monarchy that has its counterparts in the kingdoms of the Near East but has little to do with the world of piratical chieftains on the beachhead of Troy. There are Homeric names on the tablets, but though some of them are Achaean (Orestes, Adrastus), others are Trojan (Tros, Hector), and Hector, far from being a warrior prince, is a “servant of the god” and “holds a lease.” As for the fire-blackened seventh layer of Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlik (the archaeologists’ candidate for Homer’s Troy), it can tell us nothing about its destruction—which may have been the result of earthquake rather than siege and sack. It is only one of many cities all over the Near East that went down to destruction in the late Bronze Age. The only evidence that its destroyers were an Achaean army led by the lords of Mycenae and all the cities listed in the Achaean catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad is the poem itself, a poem that is supposed to have preserved the memory of these events over the course of some five illiterate centuries.
The epic muse, however, is not the muse of history; her vision of past events is always suspect. The twelfth-century manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, a poem that almost certainly has oral origins, tells the heroic tale of the great invasion of Moslem Spain led by Charlemagne, and of the deaths of Roland and his friend Oliver in the pass of Roncesvalles, where the Frankish rear guard was attacked by Moslem hordes led by beys and pashas. The invasion took place in A.D. 778. Forty years later, Einhard wrote his famous Life of Charlemagne, from which we learn that the rear guard was attacked not by Moslems but by the Basques, who were Christians like the Franks. This substitution does not inspire confidence in oral poetic tradition as a historical source; it would suggest by analogy that the historic core of the Iliad may have been a battle between Trojans and Hittites or a war between Mycenae and Thebes.
But though we may have our doubts, the Greeks of historic times who knew and loved Homer’s poem had none. For them history began with a splendid Panhellenic expedition against an Eastern foe, led by kings and including contingents from all the more than one hundred and fifty places listed in the catalogue in Book 2. History began with a war. That was an appropriate beginning, for the Greek city-states, from their first appearance as organized communities until the loss of their political independence, were almost uninterruptedly at war with one another. The Greek polis, the city-state, was a community surrounded by potential enemies, who could turn into actual belligerents at the first sign of aggression or weakness. The permanence of war is a theme echoed in Greek literature from Homer to Plato. We Achaeans, says Odysseus in the Iliad, are
“the men whom Zeus decrees, from youth to old age, must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end until we drop and die, down to the last man. ” (14.105-7)
And in Plato’s Laws the Cretan participant in the discussion says: “Peace is just a name. The truth is that every city-state is, by natural law, engaged in a perpetual undeclared war with every other city-state.” There was no lack of declared wars, either. The citizens of Athens in the great century of Greek civilization, the fifth B.C., were at war, on land and sea, for more years than they were at peace. In the Louvre in Paris there is an inscription, dating from the early 450s, that lists the names of 171 men of one of the ten Athenian tribes, who died “in war, on Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, Aegina, Megara in the same year.” Athens at this time was fighting not only the Persian Empire but also her former ally against Persia, Sparta and its Peloponnesian League. She had been fighting the Persians continually since 480 and Sparta since 460. In 448 she made peace with Persia and in 446 with Sparta and the League. But the peace lasted only fifteen years. In 431 the Peloponnesian War began, to end in 404 with the surrender of Athens and the loss of her naval empire.
The fighting Homer describes—duels between chieftains who ride up to the battle line in chariots, dismount, and exchange speeches, sometimes quite long ones, before engaging man-to-man with spear and shieid—is clearly a creation of the epic muse rather than a representation of actual battle conditions. The Mycenaeans had chariots in quantity, as Linear B inventories show (over two hundred chariots at Cnossos, for example), but such expensive equipment would have been put to better use, and although hand-to-hand combatants may shout at each other, they do not make speeches. Yet for Homer’s later audiences and readers, the combats of heroes in the Iliad did not seem unfamiliar, since Greek battles, for centuries after his time, were fought by armored infantry at close quarters; archers were rare and cavalry was used only in pursuit, after the enemy infantry line had been broken and turned to flight. Though the citizen-soldier of the polis did not fight individual duels but faced the enemy as part of a disciplined line of overlapping shields, he still exchanged spear-thrusts with his opposite number in the opposing phalanx, and he could recognize as the real thing Homer’s account of what metal can do to human flesh:
Achilles lunged [at Demoleon] ...
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)
A few lines later Achilles kills another Trojan:
speared him square in the back where his war-belt clasped,
golden buckles clinching both halves of his breastplate—
straight on through went the point and out the navel,
down on his knees he dropped—
screaming shrill as the world went black before him—
clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank. (20.470-75)
There is no attempt to gloss over the harsh realities of the work of killing (“work,” ergon, is one of Homer’s words for what men do in battle) and no attempt, either, to sentimentalize the pain and degradation of violent death.
But Meriones caught him in full retreat, he let fly