Читать книгу The World of Homer - Andrew Lang - Страница 14

Table of Contents

Homer is not a scientific military historian, but a poet. Consequently, in his accounts of pitched battles, he naturally dwells on the prowess of famous individuals in the single combat; the struggle of one hero against a group of assailants; the pursuit and the flight; more than he dwells on the long encounter of marshalled lines before "the break in the battle."

Let us consider the battle in Iliad, xi. The princes begin by giving their chariots to the charioteers, "to hold them in by the fosse, well and orderly," and "themselves as heavy men-at-arms were hastening about."[1] They are then marshalled in order, with the chariots behind them. Meanwhile Hector arrays the Trojans, being now with the front and now with the rear ranks.[2] The fight begins; "equal heads had the battle." The two forces meet like two bands of reapers shearing the corn of a field from either limit, and meeting in the centre.[3] This steady fight of lines of dismounted men-at-arms endures from dawn to midday, till, at noon, comes "the break in the battle," "the Danaans by their valour brake the battalions."[4] Agamemnon, on foot, rushes into the ruined ranks of Troy, and slays many Trojans in their chariots (which they would naturally mount for the sake of speedier flight); there is a pursuit of the broken foe, "footmen kept slaying footmen as they were driven in flight, and horsemen slaying horsemen with the sword"; till the flying Trojans rally at the Scaean gate, while Agamemnon still slays the hindmost fugitives. A flesh-wound irks him, and he "retires hurt." Hector, by command of Zeus, has waited for this moment, and now leads a chariot-charge among the scattered Achaeans. Henceforth there is a series of individual encounters; Odysseus is alone and is surrounded; he fights hard; he calls for aid, and is rescued by Menelaus and Aias. Several Achaean princes are wounded, among others Diomede, Agamemnon, and Odysseus retire to their quarters for rest and surgical aid.

This is not scientific fighting: no general is apart, receiving news of the fight, sending supports where they are needed, husbanding the reserves, and so forth. The leaders actually lead, and their men are discouraged and give ground when the chiefs are put out of action, precisely as in the Highland armies of clans under Dundee or Montrose or Prince Charles, where so much depended on the success of the first onslaught. Homer's men have more faculty for recovering from a severe stroke. The Achaeans, after a long struggle of heavy dismounted men-at-arms, drive the Trojans to the city wall. The Trojans rally, and drive the Achaeans to their own fortifications, where there is a confused mellay at the fosse and under the wall.[5]

Polydamas very properly now advises the chivalry of Troy to dismount and fight on foot (πρυλέες) in dense columns, while their chariots are held stationary by their squires. Hector approves, and the dismounted Trojans form five columns of attack on a fortified position.[6] The Achaeans, scattered and disheartened, are mainly led and helped by the two Aiantes, but Poseidon rallies five or six young heroes of Boeotia, Aetolia, Crete, and Pylos.[7] They are confessedly both wearied and demoralised by the success of Hector in breaking down the gate.[8] They are actually weeping!

But now, encouraged by the god, they form a "schiltrom," a close clump of spears advanced and levelled, underlying and overlying each other.[9] (The spears of defenders and assailants, at the battle of Langside (1568), were so closely interlocked, that discharged pistols and daggers thrown by the combatants lay on them!) Shield touches shield, the plumes of the helmets meet.[10]

As was natural, Hector's column was arrested by the "dark impenetrable wood" of Achaean spears,[11] and now the poet makes Poseidon, who has lost a grandson (xiii. 207) in the fight, stir up Idomeneus, who is at a distance from Hector's point of attack, and we have the day of valour, and the success of the Cretan prince, on the left of the Achaean fortified position. The Boeotians there, with the Athenians and "Ionian tunic-trailers," are hard pressed, but the Aiantes make a stout resistance, and the arrows of the Locrians are showered on Hector's column.[12] Polydamas advises Hector to retreat, but he hurries off and brings up reinforcements in good order. He then tries again and again to break through the schiltrom of the Achaean dismounted men-at-arms, and the two forces clash with cries of onset.[13]

Here we have a renewal of the steady conflict of men duly marshalled. Hector, however, is put out of action, sore smitten by a boulder from the hand of Aias; the Trojans give ground, are pursued, and fall back, till when Hector revives, Aias and the princes who joined him at the command of Poseidon, form a firm line of resistance.[14]

Again there is a dogged contest of marshalled forces, till Apollo causes a panic among the Achaeans, and their line is broken. "Then man fell upon man when the close fight was scattered,"[15] and we have a new set of individual valiances, among the bravest; but the Achaean host is flying in disorderly rout, "hither and thither in terror," through the ditch and within the wall.

It is in his chariot, to which he had been carried when stunned by the boulder, that Hector now calls for a chariot charge on the fosse and wall, which Apollo makes possible by levelling the wall into the dyke.[16] After mixed fighting, the spear of Aias is lopped in twain by the sword of Hector, and fire is thrown into the ship of Protesilaus. This is the moment that Achilles has prayed and longed for since the first book of the poem. Addressing Agamemnon, he then swore a great oath by the sceptre that "longing for Achilles shall come upon the Achaeans one and all, when multitudes fall dying before manslaying Hector."[17] In the same book he bids Thetis pray to Zeus to "hem the Achaeans among the sterns of their ships, given over to slaughter."[18] When the Embassy sought Achilles in Book ix., with the offers of Agamemnon, this dire need had not fallen on the Achaeans, and Achilles rejected their prayers. But he promised to fight if Hector, as he burned the ships, came to those of the Myrmidons.[19]

Hector never came so far; for[20] though Achilles kept the letter of his vow in Book ix., and did not arm, he sent Patroclus forth in Achilles' armour, at the head of the Myrmidons, and their charge on rear and flank drove the Trojans far from the ships and the wall.

This is a brief summary of the main movements in the engagement, up to the moment when Achilles let slip the Myrmidons. We see that, setting aside the interferences of gods, and the pardonable exaggeration of the prowess of favourite heroes, we have a set of as natural pictures of the flux and reflux of battle-tides as if we were reading about Waterloo. The character of the engagements is conditioned by the use of dismounted men-at-arms as heavy infantry, whether employed in lines of resistance, in squares or schiltroms of levelled spears, or in columns of attack. The fighting men in view are the gentry, stiffening "the host," the λαός of whose equipment we know little, while the archery of light-armed bowmen, such as the Locrians, is not without its effect. But the bows are short, and the arrow is drawn only to the breast, not, as by Egyptian and Assyrian archers, on the monuments, and by the archers of mediaeval England, to the ear. Chariots are not employed, in Homer, as on the Egyptian monuments, in charging squadrons, closely and neatly arranged, but in the flight and the pursuit, and to bear the prince rapidly to distant points of the field.[21]

The most obvious and closest analogy to Homeric warfare is that of the period (1300–1430 A.D.) when the Flemings and Scots had shown the powerlessness of charges of heavy cavalry against the schiltroms of spearmen, if these had not been broken up by "artillery preparation," by the long bow. Henceforth the English knights, squires, and "lances," or men-at-arms dismounted, their horses being held in reserve, and received the attacks of the heavy French cavalry on foot, with spear, sword, and axe. In case of defeat (which did not occur) or of pursuit, the horses were in readiness. Heavy armed infantry, like the hoplites of historic Greece, were developed later than Homer, and the heavy cavalry then became a separate arm. The changes occurred in the dim age between the date of the Iliad and Odyssey and the dawn of historic Greece. Chariots ceased to be employed in war by the Greek cities of Asia. The chief arm was the heavy drilled infantry, the hoplites. We catch our first glimpses of them on the Warrior Vase of the upper and later stratum at Mycenae, and on an old sculptured Mycenaean stele, later "plastered over and painted in fresco." In the former is a line of swordless spearmen on the march; on the latter, a row of swordless spearmen in the act of brandishing the spear. Their bucklers are worn on the left arm: they appear to wear hauberks, not corslets of plate, but one cannot be certain.[22] In these figures we see the germ of the infantry of historic Hellas. The war chariot becoming obsolete, civic cavalry were employed; the horsemen of Colophon were celebrated for dealing a fatal conclusive charge.

Nothing could be much less like Homeric than historical Ionian warfare, except in so far as Homer's dismounted men-at-arms resemble the heavy historic infantry, who never mount.

We have now given a brief sketch of Homer's idea of a general engagement in force. The clash of marshalled lines of heavy dismounted men-at-arms ends in the breaking of the phalanxes, and in the single combats, or combats of small knots of heroes, in which the poet and his audience take special delight.

We now criticise the modern criticisms of Homeric pictures of battles.

Herr Mülder, in 1906, and Mr. Murray, in 1908, discover that Homeric formations and fighting are a confusion of the methods of historic Greece—with drilled hoplites and cavalry—and the "Mycenaean" system of "a battle of promachoi or champions."[23]

According to the English critic, in the Iliad "the men are, so to speak, advertised as fighting in one way, and then they proceed to fight in another."[24] As we have seen, they are "advertised as fighting in one way," that is, in ordered phalanxes of dismounted men-at-arms, and they do fight in that way, from dawn till noon; and then when "the phalanxes are broken," when "the battle is scattered," they "fight in another way"; there is flight, pursuit, and examples of individual valour; there is a rally, and the lines of men on foot re-form. What else could there possibly be? The charge of the Union brigade, at Waterloo, begins by "fighting in one way," a resistless charge of squadrons, and ends by "fighting in another way," in knots, with individual examples of flight, or of single prowess, when Piré's Red Lancers swoop down on the scattered and broken ranks. At Bannockburn you have the slow advance of the clogged English columns on a narrow front, you have the slow advance in mass of the Scottish spearmen, till "the phalanxes are broken" of England, and then comes the isolated struggle of Edward II., and the charge of d'Argentine—alone.

It was always thus that men fought, before the invention of modern projectiles. It was thus they fought at Inkerman, nay, for a moment at Waggon Hill, as one who was in the thick of it informs me. Ian Hamilton and de Villiers, Albrecht and Digby Jones were among the promachoi.

There is no confusion of a "Mycenaean" and a historic mode of battle in Homer; and we have absolutely no evidence as to how a "Mycenaean" or Aegean general engagement was conducted: no Aegean work of art in which it is represented.[25]

There is no confusion of military styles in Homer; the trouble is caused when Herr Mülder chooses to say that there is confusion; that a fight of masses is promised (apparently by an Ionian interpolator), and that single combats are given (apparently by the older minstrel).[26] Both sorts of fighting are given in their proper places: the engagement of masses before, the individual valiances after "the battle is scattered," while in the clash of the massed forces, the conduct of prominent assailants and defenders is noted. Mülder's remarks arise from his eagerness to prove that not only the armature is a muddle of anachronisms, which is not the case, but that the fighting, too, is anachronistic and self-contradictory.

The aged Nestor remembers and approves of a mode of fighting which, at Troy, has become obsolete, owing to the new system of dismounting the men-at-arms and arraying them in line or in column of attack. He says to his Pylians (Iliad, iv. 303 seqq.), "Neither let any man, trusting to his horsemanship and valour, be eager to fight the Trojans alone before the rest, nor yet let him draw back. … But whensoever a warrior from his own chariot can come at the chariot of the foe, let him thrust forth with his spear, even so is the far better way," the old way. "The style of fighting is not Epic," says Mr. Leaf. It is meant not to be "Epic"; it is old-fashioned, like Nestor.

We know "the old way" from pictures on Egyptian monuments, showing the charge of squadrons using the bow, and routing an irregular advance of Hittite chariotry, using the spear. But, under Troy, the combatants usually fight dismounted; always, in the opening of a general action. But though Nestor recommends the old chariotry tactics, Herr Mülder says that he is recommending the historic, "the modern method," and attributing it to the old military school of his youth (οἱ πρότεροι).[27] The general purpose is to prove that "edifying passages from the old Ionic hortatory writers seem to have been introduced into Homer."[28]

The tactics and military formations of Homer are as intelligible as those of Chandos and Henry v. They can only be misunderstood by critics under the suggestion of the idea that the Iliad is riddled with Ionian tamperings. The Ionians never touched the matter of the Iliad.

[1] Iliad, xi. 49, αὐτοὶ δὲ πρυλέες σὐν τέύχεσιθωρηχθέντες. Cf. v. 744, πρυλέες "may mean either footmen or champions." Leaf.

[2] Iliad, xi. 59–66.

[3] xi. 67–69.

[4] θαλάγγαι, xi. 90.

[5] Iliad, xii. 3, μάχοντο ὀμιλαδόν. Cf. xii. 35, 36.

[6] xii. 66–107.

[7] Iliad, xiii. 81–124.

[8] xiii. 80–90.

[9] πτύσσοντο, xiii. 134.

[10] xiii. 128–133.

[11] xiii. 144–148.

[12] xiii. 789–906.

[13] xiii. 833–837.

[14] xv. 299–301.

[15] Iliad, xv. 328.

[16] xv. 343–366.

[17] i. 241–244.

[18] i. 409–412.

[19] ix. 653–656.

[20] xvi. 1–155.

[21] Rapid retreat, xi. 359–360. Rapid pursuit, viii. 87–90, 340–349. Leaf on viii. 348. Cf. Caesar, Bellum Gallicum, iv. 33. Chariot in attendance to remove wounded hero, xi. 273, 399. Quick mounting and dismounting, xvi. 426, 427.

[22] Ridgeway, E. A. G., vol. i. pp. 313–315.

[23] R. G. E. pp. 141–143. Homer und die altjonische Elegie, pp. 32–41.

[24] R. G. E. p. 143.