EPISODE 10 “BEACHHEAD”

You are listening to Trojan War, the podcast, history's most awesome epic. This is episode 10 in the series. Today's episode is titled Beachhead. So welcome back to episode number 10 of Trojan War, the podcast. This episode is titled Beachhead. So Artemis, the goddess responsible for grounding Agamemnon's Greek fleet, now that Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, well, Artemis kept her end of the bargain, if you will, and allowed the winds to blow in the proper direction in the Mediterranean once again. And so Agamemnon's fleet departed across the Aegean Sea for the city of Troy. It was an easy departure. The winds were actually absolutely perfect, and Agamemnon knew that his thousand boats would easily be on the shores of Troy in a short five-day sail. Now, of course, a fleet of a thousand boats couldn't stay in tight, close formation across those five days of travel, because these boats had to land every night on a shore someplace to provision and to make a camp. So essentially, the fleet broke up into smaller fleets, and island hopped to their way across the Aegean Sea, agreeing that what they would do is they would reconnoiter behind a large island, which was about a three-hour hard row from Troy itself. Well, on the Greeks' travel across the Aegean Sea, there was a particular warlord inside of the coalition army. He was a warlord. His name was Philoctetes. He was, frankly, a fairly minor and irrelevant warlord. He was bringing 700 men, so he had seven ships. So out of the total grand coalition army of 100,000 men-at-arms, Philoctetes was really quite irrelevant to the operation. He, though, had sworn Odysseus' oath of the quartered horse. He had bid on Helen, though his chances of winning her were slim to none, and therefore he was compelled to come along and join in the official rescue of Helen that was Operation Trojan Storm. So Philoctetes had shown up at Port Adalas and was participating in the mission. Now, as I said, there was absolutely nothing unique or special about Philoctetes, save for one particular thing. Philoctetes had a magic bow and a quiver of magic arrows. Now, where he had got this magic bow and magic arrows is a long epic story in itself, which we don't need to know. But the gist of the story, just to fill you in, is that the magic bow and the magic quiver of arrows had belonged to the ancient Greek hero Heracles. We now refer to him most of the time as Hercules. Same guy. And Heracles had this magic bow. The property of this bow was special. No matter where you aimed this bow, the bow managed to successfully find its target, regardless of the distance or the speed of the target or whatever the challenge is. This bow, when it shot an arrow, the arrow would arrive on target every time. So that was particularly useful. And the arrows themselves, well, they've been dipped into the poison of a monster that Hercules or Heracles had killed years ago. And if you got hit by one of these magic arrows, well, it guaranteed certain death, but not just certain death, long, slow, painful, agonizing death. And so, Philoctetes had inherited this bow and arrow from Heracles, Hercules, when Heracles, Hercules, the human being, was about to die and was about to actually ascend into the heavens and become one of the Olympian gods himself. And he bequeathed this particular weapon to Philoctetes for reasons that really don't matter to us. The point is, Philoctetes, now, though he was a nominal warlord of a nominal kingdom, had this unique cachet inside of the Greek army of having a particularly lethal and useful weapon. So the other Greek warlords treated Philoctetes with, well, a fair bit of respect and some degree of caution. Well, it turned out that as the Greek fleet island-hopped its way across the Aegean Sea towards the invasion of Troy, and they landed at night at different islands or beaches to spend the night and set up their tents, on one of these particular small islands where they landed for a night, Philoctetes leapt ashore, and as he was pitching his tent for the evening, he was bitten in the foot by a poison serpent. The serpent slithered away before anybody could identify the particular nature of the serpent, but immediately following the bite on Philoctetes' foot, well, the foot swolled up to an unnaturally large size. Philoctetes went into a horrifically high fever. All accounts tell us that the foot itself began to fester, and the wound began to pus and ooze nasty, nasty green stuff. And all accounts tell us that the foot of Philoctetes began to stink to the high heavens themselves. Well, Philoctetes fell into a stupor, the fever was really high, and while the other Greek physicians looked at him and recognized that Philoctetes was done for, there was nothing they could actually do to save this poor man's life. So, not wanting to slow down the fleet anymore, and figuring, well, we'll just have to get along without Philoctetes' 700 soldiers and his unique weapon, the Greeks had decided to deposit Philoctetes on a tiny nearby island, just a postage stamp of an island. They'd put Philoctetes ashore in the island with a barrel of water, a barrel of food, and because Philoctetes, even in his delirious fever, wouldn't let go of it, they left Philoctetes with his magic bow and arrow. And then, of course, the Greek fleet, regretting the loss of Philoctetes, but with a much greater mission on their minds, sailed away and assumed that Philoctetes would likely be dead there in a matter of days. And that was the last that anybody thought or remembered Philoctetes. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is the last that you or I will think about or remember Philoctetes until many, many, many episodes from now when, well, you know how the epics work, Philoctetes will return to the plot in a completely delicious and wonderful fashion. So, on to the invasion of Troy itself. Well, Agamemnon's fleet of 1,000 boats reconvened off the shores of an island a three-hour hard row from Troy. Now, the fleet was not allowed at this point to just row up onto the beaches of Troy and attack. There were very, very strict rules of combat which, well, seemed to be ordained by Zeus, king of the gods himself, and hence nobody on either side in this war wanted to mess with those rules. And one of the rules of combat required that before a nation could attack another nation, they had to actually formally declare war. And they had to go through a process of sending an embassy, a series of ambassadors to the foreign nation to see if there was any way to possibly avoid war in the first place. So, Agamemnon was required to appoint a small embassy of representatives to travel to Troy itself and to deliver the articles of war and see whether peace was at all possible. Now, Agamemnon wasn't going to go on this. You always send representatives. And so, Agamemnon turned around and, well, his brother Menelaus absolutely insisted on being part of the embassy. Menelaus was furious, still reeling at the loss of Helen, who he believed had been stolen against her will and brought to Troy. And Menelaus absolutely insisted that he wanted an opportunity to personally address the Trojan throne room and King Priam and demand that Helen, his property, be returned to him. And so, Agamemnon agreed to allow Menelaus to go. But, well, Menelaus had his own axe to grind. He was a hothead and he wasn't the sharpest of the Greek soldiers at the best of times. So, Agamemnon had turned around to, of course, Odysseus and said, Odysseus, would you form the other party in the embassy? I need somebody who can keep a cool head and take some notes on what they see inside the walls of Troy. So, Menelaus and Odysseus had hopped into a small boat, rowed across the last few hours, landed on the beaches of Troy, where they were greeted by the Trojans, by a ceremonial honor guard, put onto chariots and brought up, gradually and slowly, through the walls of Troy up to the palace and the throne room of King Priam himself. Now, Priam, of course, was a wily old customer and a consummate politician and he knew that the embassy would be coming. And so, consequently, Priam had directed the chariot route through the city. He knew that there'd be at least one intelligent Greek inside of that particular embassy. So, he had directed the honor guard and the chariots through the city to follow a course which would maximize, well, Troy's own shock and awe tactics. He wanted to overwhelm the Greeks with the sheer majesty of his walls, of the size and the scale and the strength of his city. He wanted to, essentially, before the Greeks even made it to the throne room, have convinced the Greeks, psychologically, that the invasion of Troy was absolutely an impossibility. So, a long, winding, circuitous route was followed up through the city of Troy and as Menelaus, stewing and raging over Helen, ignored it all, Odysseus took full opportunity of Priam's shock and awe travel schedule and Odysseus took detailed and comprehensive mental notes of everything which might be of a future tactical advantage in an attack on Troy. So, Odysseus took notes of the height of the walls, the composition of the walls, the strength of the gates, what the gates were built out of, the width of the streets, points of attack. Odysseus even looked at the width of the drains leading out of the city on the possibility that possibly a Greek, someday in the future, might have to crawl into the city through one of those drains. So, Odysseus reconnoitered and took everything in. Well, eventually, Menelaus and Odysseus, the Greek embassy, made it into the throne room of Troy, where they were formally announced and presented to Priam and the entire assembled royal family. Well, Menelaus stepped forward and he handed to Priam the two tablets which were part of the ceremony of these formal pre-war embassies. These were two little stone tablets. One of them would have had stamped onto it an image of Ares, god of war, and the other tablet would have had stamped onto it an image of a goddess of peace. And the idea was that the Trojans, after they had heard the Greek case and the Trojans, after they had deliberated, would either select to keep the tablet of war and throw away the tablet of peace or vice versa, and that's how the decision would be rendered. Well, Priam stepped forward. He greeted Odysseus and Menelaus warmly, and Priam, of course, played ignorant. He lied. He turned around and he expressed incredibly great confusion and wondered precisely why there were so many Greeks. He had heard rumors that they were marshalling just offshore, and Priam asked very innocently, well, why are you here? I don't understand what has brought you here. And, of course, Priam knew what had brought the Greeks there, but it was a good opening gambit. And, of course, Menelaus fell for the bait, and he flew into a rage and began screaming and yelling hysterically about Paris and the violation of Zinnia and about a violation of his hospitality and how Helen, his property, his wife, had been taken and abducted against her will and brought back to Troy, and how justice and all the rules of gods and men demand that Helen be returned with compensation to Menelaus right now. And Menelaus went on at length, and he got redder and redder in the face, and Priam sat there and quietly listened to the entire thing. He was ready for it. And when Menelaus had finally finished, Priam had turned around and innocently asked that... He was surprised by this. The version of the story he had heard had been that, well, Helen had left voluntarily, and they had left Sparta hand in hand, that it hadn't been an abduction, it had been Helen's choice, and that once Helen had made it back to Troy, Priam explained, he had asked Helen where she preferred to stay, and Helen had said that she wanted to marry Paris, and so Priam had said the priests did the appropriate thing. They annulled the wedding between Menelaus and Helen, and they remarried Helen to Paris. And now, well, as far as Priam was concerned, Helen was a free agent. She could go where she pleased. And this, folks, is really an interesting difference between Bronze Age Greek and Bronze Age Trojan society. These concepts of women's rights and emancipation and women going where they pleased and having rights and things like that was completely, of course, foreign to the misogynistic Greek world of Menelaus. But inside of Troy, they actually... Well, though Troy wasn't any sort of paragon of feminism according to 21st century standards, relative to Greece, it was a pretty good place to be a woman. So what Priam was saying was actually true. Trojan women did get choice on things like this. Well, then it was Odysseus' turn to stand up and speak. And Odysseus, a much more clever man, spent absolutely no time on justice issues or on who was to blame, on whether Helen had come voluntarily or not, and on semantics of women's rights or things like that. Odysseus cut to the chase and the brass tacks of the decision that the Trojans were going to have to face right away. And Odysseus turned around, and respectfully to Priam, he said, look, let's just address the facts of the situation. And Odysseus explained that just a three-hour row offshore, Agamemnon, king of kings, had marshaled a Greek coalition army of 100,000 men at arms with 1,000 boats. And Odysseus said, that's 100,000 men who will be landing on your beach within 24 hours, King Priam, if you choose to accept the tablets of war. Then Odysseus turned around and said, we know that you have 75,000 soldiers inside of your city, so numerically we will outnumber you. Odysseus then went on to point out that Agamemnon was personally invested in the mission, that Priam might not have realized it, but Agamemnon had actually been so invested in the mission that he had actually sacrificed his own daughter to the gods to get to Troy. So it was unlikely that psychologically Agamemnon was going to do anything but stick around until the mission was complete. Now, Odysseus did turn around and acknowledge some of the Trojan advantages to Priam. He tried to present a balanced case, and he said, Priam, I recognize that you have spectacular walls in your city, and yes, I've heard all the prophecies about the walls of Troy never being destroyed by an enemy force. And as I was brought up into the city, I'm aware of the incredible, incredible fortifications that you have. The question I think that you might face, my King Priam, with all due respect, is whether you were comfortable and happy enough to stay inside of these walls for years and years and years of siege warfare. Is holding on to Hellen worth it for you? They're lovely walls, but if we're camped on your beach, Priam, you will be forced to spend many years inside of those walls. Is it worth it to you? And finally, Odysseus, in a very bold and brash but calculated and accurate understanding of Trojan political and court politics, Odysseus had turned around to Priam and said, and with all due respect, King Priam, do you think that your hold on power here in Troy is better served by war or by a course of peace? That is really the question that I will leave for you. And at that point, Odysseus had bowed. He had made his case for peace as best he could. Odysseus and Menelaus were ushered out of the throne room, billeted safely inside of the city under a Trojan honor guard, and the courtroom, the royal palace room of Priam and the royal retainers and family went to work on deliberating what to do next. Now, folks, it's worth getting a sense of who might have been inside of that throne room in Troy when the deliberations on war or peace were being decided. And you'll begin to realize once I tell you about this just how difficult a decision Priam faced. What we need to understand is that Priam was a monarch in the Middle Eastern classic sense of the word. Priam was a monarch who had a huge and extended royal family. And the reason for this, of course, is that Priam was a monarch with many, many, many wives. His queen, of course, Hecuba, was wife number one, but there were other, other wives. And then there, of course, there were all the women inside of the royal harem, and Priam had fathered, as a consequence, a massively large number of sons. Homer's Iliad tells us that Priam had over 50 sons and then countless daughters. Daughters weren't really even counted. There were so many of them. And so what you had inside of the throne room of Troy on the day when the Trojans had decided on a policy of war or peace was, well, you had Priam, you had his son, his son from his wife, Hecuba, the queen. That son's name, of course, was Hector. You had Paris, the younger son from Hecuba, the queen, but there were also sons from other queens, well, not queens, but other wives. There were multiple sons from other wives, some of them highly accomplished politicians. And then there were step-sons and cousins, and there was a whole host of different families. And what it meant is that inside of all of these kingdoms, which had multiple wives and multiple heirs to the throne, there was constantly internal backroom politics. And the risk at any time that one particular faction would see weakness inside of the current faction that was holding onto power and palace coups would result. So as Priam made his decisions, he just didn't have to consider Greece as an enemy. He had to recognize that even inside of Troy, inside of his own throne room, there were the possibility of many, many, many Trojan enemies who would try to overthrow him and try to overthrow his son Hector's claim onto the throne. So politics inside of Troy was no easy business. Now, we don't know which of the different Trojan princes or factions spoke on behalf of different arguments on war or peace, but we do know from the record what the arguments were. And of course, the first argument that came forward was the argument that many, many, many of the Trojans put forward that, well, certainly, certainly, certainly, the Greeks, even if they had this huge army, weren't going to be capable of a sustained siege war against Troy. And this argument was grounded in a fairly good understanding of the Greek world. The Greeks, if you recall, were essentially at their heart pirates. The Greek way of fighting up until the war against Troy was a quick smash-and-grab approach. You would zoom into the shore of a particular place you were attacking without warning in your long boats. You'd grab what you could. You'd loot. You'd rape. You'd pillage. You'd hop onto your boats, and you'd take off again. So the Greeks were not experts and had absolutely no experience whatsoever in anything like siege warfare. So there were factions inside of Priam's court who said, Look, just let Agamemnon and his coalition army sit in the beach in hot white canvas tents for a few weeks, and you watch those Greeks. If they can't get easy treasure inside of Troy, well, they'll end up fighting each other, and they'll go home. And, of course, then there was the other faction, the disbelievers in the numbers that Odysseus had presented. And Odysseus had said that Agamemnon had 1,000 boats and 100,000 men at arms, and those kind of numbers were, by many Trojans, seen as ridiculous hyperbole, completely ludicrous and impossible. No coalition army or fleet of that size had been assembled in any war inside of the history of the Mediterranean or the Middle East inside of the recollection of any of the men inside of that throne room. So there were huge numbers of Trojans who argued that, well, Odysseus was trying to use huge shock and awe numbers, but the size of the fleet that was actually going to show up on the shores of Troy would like to be more in the neighborhood of maybe 20,000 or 25,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 men, well short of the 75,000 soldiers that Priam commanded. There was a third faction, of course, inside the throne room. There were the Trojans who said, you know, even if Agamemnon shows up with 100,000 men and even if Agamemnon decides to sit on the beach and conduct a siege, well, it really doesn't matter because we have the walls of Troy. Now those walls, as every Trojan child grew up being told, the prophecies had said that those walls had been built by a god. Most people said the god Poseidon had built the walls. And the prophecy about the walls is that the walls of Troy would never be destroyed by an enemy force. And so far in Trojan history, the prophecy had been true every time. So there were many, many Trojans inside of that throne room that said, well, let the Greeks come. Let the Greeks sit on the beach. They can sit there for one year, five years, 10 years, 20 years. It doesn't matter. Nobody's getting inside of our walls. We will be safe here. And all evidence suggested that that was likely true. And, of course, then there was another possible argument in favor of war and of not granting peace terms. And that would have been an argument put forward by Priam's immediate family, by himself, by Hector. I won't credit Paris with being capable of that level of geopolitical thought, but certainly Hector would have put forward the argument that, well, if you think about it really, Priam had cast his lot in favor of war against Greece a year ago when he had allowed the abducted wife of the Greek king to stay and had allowed that abducted woman to become Helen of Troy instead of Helen of Sparta. If Priam had have wanted to avert any kind of a conflict with the Greek world, then a year ago on the day when Paris had shown up with Helen arm in arm, Priam would have summarily sent Helen back to Menelaus with gold and a thousand apologies for the misunderstanding and made peace with the Greeks right then and there. But Priam on that particular day had chosen to announce that Trojans had every right to keep Helen and that Helen's decision to move to Troy was just and fair. And so, well, he was trapped maybe inside of his own policy. The error he had made, if he had wanted peace instead of war, was an error he had made one year earlier. And now he was trapped inside of that error. His immediate descendant, Hector, was trapped inside of that error. So there was really, really, really nothing that the Trojans inside of Priam and Hector's family lying inside of that throne room could do but carry on that particular policy of, we have a right to keep Helen right through to the bitter end. Any other form of vacillation or debate or considering, well, maybe we should return her now, would maybe have indicated weakness in some other faction inside of Priam's relatives or half cousins or children from people other than Hecuba might have used it as an excuse to stage a coup and that might have been the end of Priam and Hector. So whatever the case was, after all the deliberations were done, the royal Trojan family pulled rank on everybody else in the room and announced that it was going to be war. They were going to take the ultimate hard line with Greece. There would be no concessions. There would be no opportunity at peace. This was essentially do your best, Greece, but we are keeping Helen. We're not giving you a penny in compensation. Tear down our walls if you possibly think you can. And that was the message which the Trojans delivered back to Menelaus and Odysseus in the throne room a few days after beginning their deliberations. So Odysseus and Menelaus took a boat. They returned to the Greek invading fleet behind the island. They brought the message to Agamemnon. Odysseus, of course, was actually genuinely devastated. Odysseus, this was his last ditch effort at peace and at getting back home to his island kingdom of Ithaca with his wife Penelope and his newborn son Telemachus. And Odysseus now knew that he was stuck. There was nothing he could do. He was going to be in Troy for the long haul. Agamemnon, of course, so he expressed outward regret that Helen wasn't returned and this could be resolved amicably. Well, Agamemnon was secretly delighted. The last thing Agamemnon wanted was peace and the return of Helen. What Agamemnon wanted was to bring Troy to its knees and assume kingship of the city and be the one that had done it and all the attendant wealth and economic glory that would go with being the Greek warlord who had destroyed Troy. And so it was war. The next day, the Greeks marshaled their thousand boats and set their sails and once they got up onto the Bay of Troy, they rode at full speed and capacity up onto the shoreline of that city attempting to affect a beachhead. Now, the day that the Greeks had decided that they were going to attack was the same day that old man Prime had turned to his son, the heir apparent to the throne, Hector, and said, Hector, I'm an old man. I'm almost 70 years old. Hector, this is your war. When the Greeks land, you're the de facto leader of the city. I'm the king, but essentially, Hector, you are going to be making all the strategic decisions. You are going to be leading the troops into battle. So when the Greeks arrived and attempted to affect a beachhead and rode hard and pulled their boats up onto the long sand and gravel beaches of Troy and the Greek sailors immediately turned into Greek marines and left ashore, well, it was Hector commanding the Trojans who unleashed a volley, a hail of arrows into the Greeks. And that hail and volley of arrows affected some damage in the landing. But as more and more and more and more and more Greek boats continued to row into the bay, and as Hector began to, to his dismay, recognize that Odysseus hadn't been lying about the number of Greeks arriving, Hector had recognized that the Greeks were going to affect a beachhead. There was no way the Trojans could stop them. So Hector had blown the trumpets of retreat and the Trojans had hopped onto their fast chariots and retreated behind the soundness and the safety of their walls. So essentially, the first conflict, the first battle between the Greeks and the Trojans was an incredibly nominal and minor affair that had no impact whatsoever in the outcome of the war to come. At that point, the Trojans hid behind their walls and the Greeks proceeded unimpeded with a very quiet and successful and safe and ordered beachhead landing on the beaches of Troy. So maybe I should tell you a little bit about that particular beach, just so you have sort of a sense of geography for this episode and episodes to come. Troy, of course, was located, this huge city was located on the shores of the Aegean Sea, and when the Greeks pulled in, they pulled into a huge sheltered and protected sand and gravel bay, which was large enough that the entire Greek fleet could essentially set up an armed camp. So the Greeks, when they pulled ashore, they pulled their long boats up and out of the water so that the hulls wouldn't rot during the course of the siege, and they blocked their boats up with huge heavy wooden blocks, took down the great sails, and then the Greek army went to work on transforming that long beach into an armed, tented city, huge white canvas tents. Agamemnon set up his command tent, which is where the commanders and the warlords would meet for their daily briefings. On the center of the beach, and it was a huge, obviously powerful tent, that was the center of the operation, Agamemnon assembled, on his immediate right-hand side, the tent of Menelaus, his brother, who was the official cause for the war, and on his left-hand side, the tent of Odysseus was set up. And then all the other warlords ranged their command tents down the length of the beach, and behind the command tents, of course, is the huge command tents of the warlords. They were the tiny tent cities of those warlords' particular soldiers, of those warlords' particular kingdoms. And so this mass, mass, mass armed city went up. All the warlords were in place. Of course, when Achilles, the greatest, most dangerous, and glorious weapon of mass destruction, set up his tent, Achilles, still smarting from the Iphigenia fake wedding episode, which now, well, every Greek knew about, and Achilles felt incredibly humiliated about, Achilles had set up his tent as far away from Agamemnon as possible, way, way down in the far reaches of the beach. Achilles and Agamemnon had decided that they didn't have much use for each other. Well, the city itself was set up, and across then from the tent city, the Trojan plain extended approximately half a mile of sand gravel, and we don't know whether there was grasslands growing in that plain or not, because the geography of the area has shifted over the last 4,000 years, of course, as the bay is silted in. But we know that there was a vast, long plain about half a mile, and then you got to the outer walls of the city of Troy itself. Now, I told you that Hector had brought his soldiers inside the walls, inside the safety of these walls of Troy, and he had every good reason to do this, and it's worth describing the city of Troy, because it was a city like the Greeks had never seen, and here's why. Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, Achilles, they were all familiar with cities. As warlords, they commanded cities, but a Bronze Age Greek city essentially consisted of a stone, well-armed and well-fortified city. citadel, a tiny little armed place, a little castle, if you will, where the warlord, the warlord's family, the warlord's attendants and select guards and select palace retainers could live and in a case of attack could retreat behind the walls of that city. But the citadel itself in Greece, inside of the Greek world, these were tiny, tiny little temporary encampments. The people that lived around the citadel that supported the economy of the warlord city, well, they lived essentially in houses and fields and farms and shops and businesses made out of wood that were scattered outside the walls of the citadel. So if a Greek city came under attack, well, everybody that supported that city, the population had to abandon their homes, their businesses or places of work and escape with what they could and hide inside the walls of the citadel. But the walls of the citadel, of course, were safe. But the citadel itself is tiny, small and cramped and you couldn't sit or last in a citadel for long. So when the Greeks had arrived at Troy, Agamemnon had expected that what he would find at Troy was Troy, he expected to just be one very large citadel and then there'd be a city outside of the citadel. And Agamemnon was in for a huge surprise because Troy was designed much more like a Middle Eastern or a Far Eastern city. The walls of Troy were massive. They were huge and they encircled the entire life of the city of Troy. So behind the huge walls of Troy, then you had inside of those walls, all the homes, the businesses, the places of work of the entire 150,000 people that lived inside of Troy. Everybody could live safely, comfortably and conveniently inside of those walls. And inside of those walls, you had fresh sources of water, even sources of fields, food and crops. So Troy was self-contained. The walls were huge, of course. They went up at an incredibly high height. They were smooth and polished, so they were impossible to scale. In front of all the walls of Troy, huge deep ditches have been dug. And the ditches, of course, they weren't moats. They weren't filled with water because in the kind of climate of Troy, this would have led to problems with malaria. But the ditches made it almost impossible to get ladders or siege engines up against those walls. Troy, we know, had three massive gates made out of huge wooden logs, which had been clad in bronze. So the gates of Troy were almost impossible. And further, the walls of Troy were so thick that you could move soldiers across the top of the battlements of those walls in huge numbers. So Hector, fending the city against attack, could actually move soldiers to various strategic points across the top of the walls to call down enemy arrow fire onto places where the Greeks were trying to breach the walls and that sort of thing. So Troy was huge and then everybody lived inside of it. And then in the center of Troy, there was actually the citadel of the royal family. So if, God's forbid, and it had never happened, the walls of Troy were breached. Well, the royal family could then hold up for a final last ditch effort at survival inside of the citadel itself. So Troy was a city unlike anything, anything, anything that the Greeks had ever seen. So Agamemnon and the other warlords, when they arrived, weren't quite ready for what they were facing. And Hector, when he saw the size of the fleet, recognized, well, I will just move everybody inside. We'll seal the gates and we'll sit out the Greek siege. They won't stay for long, I don't believe. Well, after Agamemnon had moved into the city and set up his army, which took him four to five days, Agamemnon, on the next day, marshalled the Greek army. He blew the trumpets and the entire assembled hundred thousand Greek men marched across to the halfway point in the plain between the walls of Troy and the beach. And Agamemnon stood there and he patiently waited. And according to Greek ways of conducting war, what Agamemnon fully expected is that sometime in the next hour or so, the gates of Troy would open and Hector, leading the 75,000 Trojan army, would march out to the halfway point in the plain. And then the priests, because the Trojans and the Greeks worship the same gods, the priests would invoke all the sacrifices and rules of war. And then a hundred thousand Greeks and 75,000 Trojans would essentially have at it. And Agamemnon, doing the math, recognized that at the end of that day, the Greeks would triumph. They just had superior firepower in numbers. So Agamemnon brought his soldiers across and he stood and he patiently waited in the morning for Hector to bring out his Trojan soldiers and the great battle which Agamemnon had promised would begin. What Agamemnon wasn't ready for, of course, is Hector's decision. And Hector was no fool. He could stand in the battlements. He could appraise the Greek forces and he recognized that numerically he was outnumbered. And in terms of the military equipment, well, Greek military equipment was at least as good as Trojan military equipment. So Hector took a decision that morning to keep his troops inside of the city and trust to the safety of his walls. So no Trojan army came out to fight. And that presented, well, a massive inconvenience for Agamemnon. Imagine if you give a war and only one side decides to show up for it. Agamemnon really didn't know what to do. He had based all of his assumptions about this mission being a quick and glorious battle on the assumption that the Greeks would come out and fight. Or the Trojans would come out and fight. So when they didn't, Agamemnon had to go to plan B, C, D, and E, coming up with alternate ways of attacking this city. So what he decided to do was, well, what you can't do when soldiers come out and fight and that is lay siege to the city. So the first thing that Agamemnon did is he turned to his archers and he said, Odysseus told us when he was in the city that the interior of the city, the businesses and the shops and the homes surrounding the citadel are largely made out of wood. And some of them even have thatched roofs. So Agamemnon turned to his archers and he said, prepare fire arrows. What we will do is we will shoot thousands of fire arrows over the walls of Troy. They'll land onto the roofs of those thatch and wooden buildings and we'll set the city on fire from the inside. When the blaze gets large enough, the Trojans will have no choice but to open the gates of Troy from the inside to escape the flames. And when they open the gates from the inside, we will pour into the city from the outside. And it was a great idea. It was a great plan, save for one problem, which was that the walls of Troy were so high that the fire arrows, even from the best of the Greek archers, had no hope of making it up to the top of those walls. And so the fire arrows bounced feebly against Troy's walls and fell into the huge ditch and did no damage whatsoever. Next Agamemnon turned around and thought, well, we'll build ladders. We'll crawl over to the top of the walls. We'll put a lot of ladders in one place and I'll put men up and some of the men will make it onto the battlements. And then those men will allow us to essentially effect a way of opening a gate from the inside. So they went to work on constructing massive wooden ladders by felling many of the trees in Mount Ida behind the city. And what they realized very quickly is it was a physics problem. They could not build a ladder long enough and strong enough to get up to the top of the walls, which was actually light enough that they could get the ladder into position. And of course, the whole time that they're trying to get those ladders into position, Hector was calling down a fire of arrows from the top of the walls onto the Greeks doing it. So ladders weren't going to work. Next Agamemnon explored the idea of a battering ram. Maybe if we can just smash open one of the three large gates to the city, we can get in that way. So they felled a massive tree from Mount Ida and delimbed the tree, brought it back and clad one end of the trunk of that tree in a fearsome, fearsome, fearsome bronze battering ram. And then it was going to take about 200 men to actually move this battering ram, but they got the ram into position and they began to smash away mightily at one of the great Trojan gates. And the whole time they did it, of course, Hector had fire arrows raining down on the Greek soldiers trying to do it. But the effect of the battering ram was hopeless. The gates of Troy would not budge. And after a few days of battering away and losing countless men, well, the battering ram itself split into tiny little wooden splinters and the walls of Troy and the gates of Troy stayed intact. Finally, Agamemnon turned to the oldest, slowest, but most tried and true way of effecting entry into a city. So Agamemnon called to the sappers, the professional tunnel diggers, and he said, what I need you to do is build a secret tunnel, get underneath the walls of Troy. What we'll do is we'll build a tunnel someplace into the interior, make the tunnel large enough that I can get maybe 20 or 30 crack marine soldiers into that tunnel. And then once the tunnel is built, some night while Troy is sleeping, I'll get my 30 men into the city. They'll open a gate from the inside. That's how we'll get in. So the sappers, the tunnelers went to work on digging a huge, huge hole and excavating down so that they could get underneath the walls of Troy. Agamemnon knew it would take a while. He waited patiently and he waited and he waited and he waited. And finally, after a month, he called in the sappers and he said, you must be almost there. How is the tunnel coming? And the sappers kind of sheepishly turned to Agamemnon and admitted that there was a bit of a problem they had encountered. And the problem they explained to Agamemnon is that they've been digging straight down vertically for a month. And well, they had yet to reach the bottom of the walls of Troy. The walls apparently extended right into the bedrock of the very living earth itself. And it became very, very clear that the prophecies about Troy were true. The walls of Troy would not be destroyed by an enemy force. They would, they would not be crawled over by an enemy force. They would be not battered through by an enemy force. They would not be undermined by an enemy force. The walls of Troy were going nowhere. And that left Agamemnon, King of Kings, leader of the coalition army with, with a very difficult decision to make because there was only one possible successful way of getting inside of the city. So Agamemnon sat down, he called in Odysseus and the two of them had a long conversation. Odysseus pointed out to Agamemnon that there was one other way to get inside of Troy that would work for sure that would eventually bring Troy to its knees. But Odysseus said, I don't think you'll like it Agamemnon. It's, it's going to be a long and painful, painful way of doing it. But what we could do is we could essentially just starve Troy into submission. And Odysseus had explained that the, the time honored way used inside of the, the, the Eastern world, not inside of the Greek world of the Mediterranean, but in the Eastern Mediterranean and, and in Asia minor for getting inside of a city was to essentially besiege the city and wait till the people inside of the city ran out of food and living conditions inside of the city got so bad that eventually some citizen inside of the city in desperation to save themselves or to save a child agreed to open the gates from the inside. So siege warfare usually ended up in some starving person inside the city, opening the gates. And, and then of course the army could come in and, and keep or betray whatever promises it had made to the starving population. And Odysseus said, we can't do it. It relies on one thing Agamemnon. It relies on creating conditions inside the city that are more miserable than are the conditions of misery of the besieging army outside of the city. So Agamemnon, the fact of the matter is Hector and Prime will have stored away food for a number of years inside of Troy. The people of Troy will be living in luxury for years without opening their gates. Meanwhile, Agamemnon, you and I and a hundred thousand guys are going to be stuck on, on canvas tents on a blazing hot beach. It won't be fun for us, but eventually Agamemnon, if you hang in long enough, well, the tides will turn because the Trojans won't have access to more food. Whereas with our, with our fast ships, we will be able to head out across the Mediterranean and, and reprovision the army at will. So in the long run, if it's a chess match of attrition, Agamemnon, the Greeks will win a war of starvation, but you better be hunkering down for the long haul if you want to go that way. Again, Odysseus counseled Agamemnon to just give up in the entire operation and go home. But Agamemnon, who continued to have visions of, of sacrificing his daughter and of glory said, no, we're sticking with it. And so the Greeks, ladies and gentlemen, settled in for the siege of Troy and the long haul. And it was a long haul. The days turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, the months turned into years. And then one day, well, a full decade had passed and the Greeks were still on the shores of Troy, not having fought a single Trojan in those entire 10 years. Now it's, it's hard for us to actually conceptualize that Agamemnon and the Greeks believed they were going to be there for 10 years. I mean, it boggles the imagination to believe that, that they knew it was going to be a 10 year siege because it's hard for us to imagine that they would have stayed. And, and the problem of course we have is if you look at later historical records, 700 years after the war, when Homer writes this down in the Iliad, well, well, there's lots of reference is to the priests predicting a 10 year war right from the very outset inside of Homer and inside of all the other sources that comprise the Trojan war epic. So my guess in this is that essentially what happened is that years after the siege itself took place, the, when it was finally being written down the priestly class, knowing that the war had taken 10 years had decided to improve their stock and their quality of prediction by writing episodes into the written account of the story that made it look as though the priests have been predicting 10 years all along. But I think it, I think it defies logic and reason to assume that Agamemnon could have assembled a hundred thousand men on a beach if he had have known that he was going to be holding them there for a decade. So it raises a question, why on earth did the Greeks stay that long? What could possibly, possibly have kept Greece on the shores of Troy for a full 10 years? And here, I think that it's an awful lot easier for us to understand Agamemnon and the Greeks, because all we really have to do here is look to, well, contemporary example and contemporary wars to see what happens. It's very, very, very easy. And it was very, very easy for Agamemnon to launch Operation Trojan Storm. It's easy to get the Greek public or the public of any nation, a military warlord nation or a modern 21st century democracy to get excited about war. All you need to do is mobilize the propaganda machine and wrap yourself in the flag and talk about issues of justice and virtues and things like that. And the rabble or the electorate, and sometimes you can use the two terms synonymously, will immediately surround the commander-in-chief and beat the drums of war. And it happened in World War I. It happened in the Vietnam War. It happened in multiple Gulf Wars. It happened in Afghanistan. And of course, currently, as with our current 21st century unending war, our war on terror, it continues to happen. It's easy to get into a war. Getting out of the war is an awful lot more difficult, and it can almost be impossible to get out of a war that you got into. And again, the contemporary examples support the fact that the Greeks might have taken 10 years and couldn't get out of this war. And the reasons are very, very similar. Agamemnon was trapped. First of all, he was trapped by his own propaganda machine. He had promised the Greek public the return of Helen and the punishment of the Trojans. And that was the public's justification for this war. So to turn around 10 years later, or even five years into the siege, and have gone back home to Greece without Helen or without punishing the Trojans, well, the propaganda and the Greek public would have turned on Agamemnon because he wouldn't have fulfilled his promise. And so Agamemnon knew that his political fate and his political future was tied to victory in this war. There was another reason, of course. Agamemnon's psychological fate was tied to this war. Agamemnon had committed the ultimate blasphemy. He had killed his own daughter to be here. And now having committed that blasphemy, well, psychologically turning around and going home empty-handed was just something that every time the warlord returned to Agamemnon and said, have you thought about going home? Agamemnon would fly into a rage and say, we are not going home. I have too much at stake. I've invested too much in this. And so Agamemnon stayed. And then, of course, there's the third dark and frightening reason which kept every other Greek warlord obeying Agamemnon and staying in that beach. And that was that, well, when Odysseus and Ajax and Achilles and Menelaus and Agamemnon and other warlords were behind closed doors in the silence of well-guarded tents, they all acknowledged the greatest danger facing them on that beach. And the greatest danger on the beach, of course, as the years went by, was not the Trojans, but the common Greek foot soldiers. Those Greek foot soldiers, you recall, had signed up for Operation Trojan War on the promise of a quick four-week in-and-out campaign. They were going to be there for four weeks at most. And in exchange for their investment, they were going to come home with wealth beyond their wildest dreams. And that had been the promise. And so those common Greek foot soldiers had left behind their farms, their fields, their families, their businesses, and embarked on this venture capitalist four-week campaign. Well, there were now 100,000 men-at-arms on that beach. And most of those men-at-arms were just the common rabble, the cannon fodder, if you will. And they were undisciplined. They weren't professional soldiers. And while they made great pawns on the chess field battlefield, if a war was happening, well, you needed to pay those men the longer you kept them on the beach. And there were all kinds of historical precedents, even in the Bronze Age, of the dangers of bringing an unpaid, unprofessional rabble of an army back home. Because, well, what the warlords knew would happen and what they feared would happen, of course, is that if they brought those farmers, those fishermen, those illiterate peasants back to Greece after a number of years without having given them any kind of the glories and spoils of war for their troubles, well, that rabble would loot the Greek countryside looking for some form of compensation for their loss. And the warlords knew that their own heads and their own kingdoms would be sacrificed as an angry mob of unpaid Greek soldiers looted and pillaged and raped and destroyed their way through Greece itself. So there was a bitter catch-22 to this, which is that the longer the warlords kept the army on the beach, the longer the warlords needed to keep the army on the beach. And until the walls of Troy could be breached and payment could be achieved for those soldiers, well, the soldiers had to stay and continue to attempt to breach those walls. And so the Greek army, like, well, armies everywhere down through history, had got into a war and now had no viable public relations, economic, or military exit strategy for that war. And so the weeks had turned into months and months had turned into years and the years had turned into a decade. The Greeks had settled in for the long haul. Now, there were some things that they did to make the long haul a little bit more comfortable for them. As soon as the warlords realized that Hector had settled in for the long haul and was not bringing his 75,000 soldiers out, well, the Greeks had developed a strategy to make their life better and the life of the Trojans inside of the walls even more miserable. So at any given time, there were only 75,000 soldiers camped in that beach. The other 25,000 soldiers had been put into their long boats and were sent out across the Mediterranean basin to attack villages, towns, and cities throughout the entire Mediterranean world. And this was really, really good military policy. What it meant is that at any given time, 25% of your army was engaged in practice military maneuvers in real fighting conditions. And this kept the army sharp. The other thing it did is it meant that you didn't have a whole host of bored rabble on the beach for extended periods of time because bored rabble on the beach for extended periods of time would turn on each other. So essentially what the Greek warlords set up is sort of a shuttle system where a typical Greek soldier would spend two months in camp and one month off fighting and then two months in camp and one month off fighting. And this worked really, really well. It kept the soldiers occupied and busy. And the other thing it did is it meant that the Greek armed camp was constantly being reprovisioned by all, well, all of the booty, all the supplies, all the good stuff that was gained by the 25,000 Greek soldiers who were ransacking the Mediterranean at any time. So into the Greek camp came treasure, food, supplies, women, everything that a modern or an ancient army needs to keep itself occupied over a long siege. And then there was a final, of course, wonderful strategic reason for this. And that was, of course, that it cut Troy off from potential military allies or support. Prime had sent out diplomats as soon as he had realized that the Greeks had arrived on Troy and there was going to be a siege. And many, many Mediterranean kingdoms had sworn support of Troy. But the support dried up in a hurry when the Mediterranean kingdoms realized that if they sent the lion's share of their army to Troy, then the Rome home kingdoms were going to be vulnerable and unprotected. And on any given day, 25,000 Greeks might show up on their beach. And so Troy found itself as years drifted on and on and on, becoming more and more and more politically and militarily and geographically isolated from any kind of support inside of the Mediterranean. So as the years went on, Troy slowly and gradually began to have to tighten their belts and starvation became an imminent possibility. Now for Agamemnon, there were other advantages to the war. Agamemnon recognized that his chief obstacle on that beach, the other ego on that beach, was Achilles, the young superstar weapon of mass destruction. So Agamemnon, pandering to Achilles' thirst for glory and Achilles' ego and his desire for battle, and his youth, Agamemnon had suggested that Achilles spend most of the 10 years of the siege of Troy actually off on these raiding expeditions. And during that 10 years, well, Achilles made his bones. That's where he developed his reputation. He became Achilles, the soccer of multiple cities. And within 10 years, the name of Achilles was known, not just in Troy and Greece, but all over the Mediterranean world. And the name of Achilles was spoken hushed at night with fear by mothers and fathers and their children. Achilles became the scourge of the Mediterranean world. And he brought so much treasure and wealth back to the beaches of the Greeks camped at Troy that some people considered that Achilles was essentially Agamemnon's number one provisioner of the army. And so the years rolled on and on and on. The Greeks got used to invading Troy. They got used to the siege of Troy. Some of the Greek men actually were there so long that they took new wives from the captured slave women. And they colonized areas around the beaches of Troy. They set up new family and farms and immigration spread. And the entire demographic profile of the entire eastern section of the Mediterranean world changed as more and more and more Greeks settled in for the long haul. And it looked as though the long haul might have gone on for another 20 years had it not been for a critical incident that happened on the beach in year 10. And that critical incident that happened 10 years into the siege of Troy suddenly and instantly in the 10th year of the siege changed everything. And within a matter of weeks the entire war of Greece versus Troy was going to be over. And of course that incident is going to form the basis of our very very very next podcast. So we're going to stop right now with the story and I'm going to invite you at this stage to do the usual thing. If you're just in it for the story and you want to hear about the really cool critical incident about to come then I'd invite you to make your way to to trojanwarpodcast.com and the next episode, episode number 11, will be up there any day now soon for your listening pleasure. Now on the other hand if you want to stick around for the posterior commentary what I'm going to do this time is I'm going to talk about the actual soldiers that were going to fight in this particular war which is about to start in year 10 with a vengeance. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about the armor the tactics of not only the warlords but also the foot soldiers that fought in the Greek and the Trojan army. So if you if you're interested in that kind of thing if you want to geek out on on military life and technology and armor and tactics for the next 10 or 12 minutes with me then stick around and and that's what we'll be doing. So for some of you now is my opportunity to pause for a moment and allow you to make a gracious exit and then the rest of us will pick up on Bronze Age Warfare 101. So ladies and gentlemen I want to take a few moments and well tell you a story. I think it's a cool story. It shows up in Homer's Odyssey which as you likely know is a sequel to the Trojan War epic that I'm telling you. Now the story shows up I think it's in book 8 maybe book 9 of the Odyssey and the reason I like the story so much is it involves a storyteller. A guy like me but while living in the Bronze Age. The storyteller's name was Demodocus and we don't actually know an awful lot about him but what we do know is this. Demodocus was blind. He could not actually see his audience when he was performing for them. So he told his stories from memory. He likely actually sang them using a musical instrument that would look sort of like a modern-day lyre. Now no doubt Demodocus as a storyteller had a whole host of stories in his repertoire but the stories that we see him telling inside of Homer's Odyssey are stories from Greek myth and especially stories from the Trojan War epic. Now the story about Demodocus that I want to tell you takes place in the royal court of a ridiculously wealthy and cultured group of people called the Phyacians. Now Demodocus like all storytellers ancient or modern was by necessity a traveling storyteller and Demodocus had been fortunate enough to land a couple of days gigs performing at the Phyacian royal court for the royal family and their privileged guests I suppose. So my story picks up following Demodocus' live show. Apparently his rendition of the Trojan War epic that night was an absolutely huge hit with the audience. Homer actually records the words of praise directed to Demodocus well from the foremost storytelling critic who was sitting in the hall that night. Here's what the critic said I quote right from Homer, Demodocus I commend you either the muse was your teacher or else the god Apollo for you sing about the Greeks at Troy with a sure sense of what happened as if you had seen it there yourself and it is a fine thing to be listening to a storyteller. It seems to me to be the most beautiful thing in the world. And now ladies and gentlemen Homer provides us with no written account of well Demodocus' response to that generous praise but it really doesn't take an awful lot of imagination for well for you and I to infer Democitus' thoughts. First of all no doubt he was absolutely thrilled that his performance his art and all of those well behind the scenes hundreds of hours of crafting and rehearsing his stories well that that had actually all been worthwhile. For any artist artistic creation is really an act of faith. You put in the hard lonely solitary hours in advance and well once you think you've created something special you send it out there and you don't really know well until you hear the audience's response. So the rich and abundant praise from well the foremost theater critic in the FIAC audience well that would have absolutely thrilled Demodocus. But Demodocus' second response to that rich praise well it would have been well how do I put this less artistic and much more pragmatic. He would have exhaled mightily the very moment that the applause began that night because Demodocus could now be pretty well certain that when he passed around his performer's cup at the end of the show his audience would be loading that cup with coins and because the FIAC audience were so ridiculously well off the coins that they placed into his performer's cup that night well they would most certainly be gold coins. And for Demodocus one night of gold coins might be almost enough to keep him in food shelter and clothing for quite a while to come and more importantly to finance his next big Mediterranean tour. Now we had a couple of gigs already lined up in the city shows for well the wealthy merchant class who weren't invited to the shows in the palace because they were lacking in royal blood and Demodocus would always tell those wealthy merchants the very same stories it was actually the identical set list but the coins dropped into his performer's cup at those wealthy merchant shows well they'd be silver coins not gold and it wasn't that the wealthy merchants were being cheap in relative terms they were contributing at least as much to the performance cup with their silver as the FIAC and royalty were contributing with their gold and Demodocus knew that silver is a pretty useful metal when it comes to paying the bills but the real truth of it was that for Demodocus and most storytellers ancient and modern those royalty class gigs and those wealthy merchant class gigs, are few and far between. Most of Democritus's shows were in small towns and villages scattered across the entire Bronze Age Greek world. Now there were days early in his career when Democritus had actually wondered, why am I taking this three-day trek inland to tell my stories to a host of impoverished peasants in a taverna with a leaky roof and bad food, especially when I know already that when I pass my Performer's Cup, all I'm going to get is copper, no silver or gold. But later in life, Democritus figured out two things. First of all, he suspected that the poor people in those towns, they appreciated his shows at least as much as the wealthy and exceedingly cultured Phychean audience. After all, the Phychean audience were dripping in disposable cash. They were wealthy enough to pursue interesting new entertainments any day of the week that they wanted. Whereas those small-town folks, well, they were lucky if a storyteller of Democritus's stature showed up maybe once, twice a year. So Democritus, the artist, loved doing his small-town shows, and he was grateful for the applause that he got during those performances. But Democritus, the businessman, had actually figured something else out too. It turned out that those tiny copper coins that the small-town folk threw into his Performer's Cup, well, eventually those tiny copper coins added up. Sixty-five copper coins, Democritus knew, was equal to five silver ones or to one gold. And at the end of the day, it was the accumulation of the tiny copper coins that kept Democritus, the storyteller, in business. Gold and silver were special blessings from the gods, but it was copper that paid the bills. And then, well, for Democritus, there were actually those unfortunate gigs where he lost money. He recalled a recent show where, after a perilous trek through a mountain pass, Democritus had arrived at a village with a reputation for Performer Cup generosity. But on the day he arrived, he learned the bad news. A drought had recently hit the village. All the crops had failed. Everybody was hungry. The very few copper coins left in that town were unavailable to reward storytellers, even good storytellers. They were being used for more immediate concerns like feeding children or purchasing firewood. But Democritus stayed and told his stories anyway. And the appreciative locals, they came out in droves to hear the stories. Democritus suspected that, well, his stories were at least briefly transporting them to some magic wonderful world way better than the one that they were currently eking out an existence in. So for Democritus, the trek across the mountain, though it ended up with absolutely no coins in his cup, was more than worthwhile. Applause is a pretty nice form of currency, too. In fact, the only shows that Democritus ever regretted doing usually happened in the royal palaces or in the halls of the merchants, almost never in the small towns. And at those unfortunate gigs, as Democritus wryly labelled them, here is what would happen. Democritus would perform his stories, as usual. Democritus would receive rich and enthusiastic praise, as usual. But then, when Democritus would pass his performer's cup around the room at the end of the night, well, his seconds earlier delightful and delighted audience would somehow suddenly melt into the shadows without so much as dropping a solitary coin into his cup. And it wasn't at all because they were poor. In fact, Democritus knew many of them were leaving his show directly to their expensive chariots and then heading out for a night on the town of paying advance entertainments and diversions, before, of course, returning to their comfortable villas in the suburbs. Those listeners had absolutely no shortage of disposable income, Democritus knew. They simply weren't willing to toss any of that wealth Democritus' way. Well, it's likely because I'm blind, Democritus reasoned. It makes them invisible to me and, well, more importantly, it makes me invisible to them. But on better days, Democritus would search for a more charitable explanation. Oh, it's simply a Greek cultural thing, Democritus would explain to his fellow storytellers. Society somehow assumes that storytelling is a sufficient reward in itself, or that we storytellers have invented some secret alchemy that turns generous audience applause into food. Maybe those folks who skulk away without dropping a coin into our cups, they assume that Zeus or the Muses provides us not only with the stories, but looks after the bills too. And then there were those darkest of days, when Democritus would latch on to yet one other possible explanation for the listeners who melted away without offering up even a copper penny in gratitude. You know, maybe what I'm doing isn't really that useful or valuable to folks, Democritus would consider. After all, folks expect to pay stonemasons, they pay chariot drivers, they pay politicians, they pay priests, they pay cooks, they pay craftsmen. They expect to pay everybody except, well, we storytellers and the occasional street-corner busker. So maybe the free market is voting with its coins, and what I'm doing up here is not really of that much value to anybody. Ladies and gentlemen, those were bad nights for Democritus. He would sit up on his own late into the night, brooding, wallowing in self-pity, considering alternate career paths, and drinking way, way, way too much Retsina. But inevitably by the morning the dark clouds would pass, and Democritus would be himself again. You know, I really can't think of doing anything else with my life, he'd remind himself. Telling stories, especially stories of the Trojan War, it's just so much fun. So as long as a few copper coins keep coming in, and hopefully once in a while a silver or gold one, I'm just going to focus on my good fortune. The Muses have blessed me with a rare and wonderful gift. I get to do something I love, do it well, and so far I haven't starved to death. No man can ask for anything more. And so ladies and gentlemen, with that little bit of Bronze Age philosophy, I complete my shamelessly on-the-nose plea that you might drop some coins into my Performer's Cup. If you can afford to send a few coins my way, it would be wonderful. Your coins will help compensate me for the hundreds of hours involved in researching, writing, recording, editing, and mastering the 25 hours of live storytelling that is Trojan War the Podcast. And your coins will help pay my monthly fixed costs of renting cloud server space to host the episodes and to host the website. And finally, your coins will encourage me to carry on with my next project, new installments of Trojan War the Podcast. Now just so you know, I have no corporate sponsors for Trojan War the Podcast. The voluntary coins that you place into my Performer's Cup is this project's only source of funds. One final thing. I am committed to making this podcast available to everyone, everywhere, regardless of financial means. If you have no available copper coins, my podcast will always be free. But if the gods, fate, or deadly destiny has smiled generously upon you, then please consider a one-time donation of gold to my Performer's Cup. Or, on the other hand, if you're part of the merchant class, then possibly a one-time donation of silver is within your means. And if all you have by way of help is copper, then by all means, please send me copper. Those little small copper coins, as Demodocus figured out, well they add up in a hurry. And on to logistics. If you choose to make a one-time donation to my Performer's Cup, I have gone to great lengths to make the donation process fast, safe, and simple for you. I have created multiple donate options. Just go to my website, trojanwarepodcast.com, find the Donate button on the homepage, and click that button. And then, in under three minutes, you will have made a meaningful and significant contribution to this project. So, on behalf of myself, on behalf of Demodocus and, well, all of his heirs, thanks. May the gods, fate, and deadly destiny smile upon your generosity. Have an awesome day. And with that, on to the post-story commentary. Now many of us, if our understanding and our only knowledge of the Trojan War epic is through reading Homer's Iliad, which is, well, read it. It's awesome. But if that's your only encounter with this particular story of this particular war, the truth is you're going to come away with a completely skewed and inaccurate perception of what was really going to be happening on the battlefield between the Greeks and the Trojans when, in year 10, they finally got down to some serious sustained fighting. And that's because the Homeric epic and all the other parts of the Trojan War epic cycle from that particular time period, when they tell the story of this war, they're only interested in focusing on the glorious deeds of the warlord heroes of the war. So Homer talks about the deeds of Achilles, of Ajax, of Menelaus, of Hector, of Agamemnon, and he spends all of his time talking about these particular warlords. Homer isn't really interested in talking about the common, the cannon fodder, the grunts who fought in the war. And so if you read Homer, you might get the impression that the only people that fought on these battlefields were these glorious heroes. And the other impression you're going to get, of course, is that these glorious heroes in incredible armor were constantly aided, assisted, or thwarted by the Olympian deities in their fighting. So a very common recurring theme inside of Homer is that these warriors will be imbued with unnatural military glory and strength at certain points in the battle. And they'll have these moments of what the Greeks called aerosteal, where they'll do wonderful, heroic, supernatural things on the battlefield, the kind of things that, well, if you watch an Avengers movie and there's multiple heroes or superheroes in the Avengers movie, if you watch these movies, each of these Avengers, Iron Man, and then Thor, and then Captain America, will all be given their own moment of aerosteal, where they'll do some five minutes of cool special effects inside of the war. And the same sort of thing happens inside of Homer's epic. And then, of course, there are other moments where the deities thwart the Greek heroes, and suddenly they're unnaturally weaker, unnaturally capable of fighting at even a base level. So that's what Homer was interested in, and he wasn't alone. If you look at Egyptian accounts from the Bronze Age, in Egyptian stories of heroes in war, and if you look at the Hittite tradition where we also have records, well, it's the same thing. The stories that are told are of heroes and gods marching into glorious battle, and the cannon fodder, the common man is completely forgotten. Now, just a little aside here, this isn't a criticism, because one of the interesting things that's happened to us in the later 20th century and the 21st is we've almost swung the pendulum in the opposite direction in the way that we account epic stories. And now our focus tends to largely be on the little guy, the everyman, the unknown soldier. So when we tell stories of our wars now, and we get to epic glorious deeds, which could have been given a Homeric treatment, instead we give them the sort of almost the anti-Homeric treatment. So when we land on D-Day in a popular movie, we don't follow the generals ashore, we follow the episodes of a private named Ryan, and we go off and we save him. And so if Homer were a screenwriter in the 21st century, he wouldn't tell us about Achilles or Odysseus or Ajax, he'd tell us about some common Greek foot soldier who never got anywhere near those glorious heroes. So both accounts are fun, both accounts are different. I'm going to cover both though in the post-story commentary. We're going to talk about how the heroes went into battle and then how the cannon fodder grunts would have fought. So the Greek heroes, well, Homer tells us that they were supernaturally large. And actually, even if you discount the Homeric epic treatment and the supernaturally part, then there's no doubt that the warlord kings that would have fought on any Bronze Age battlefield would have appeared to the common foot soldiers as exceptionally large and huge. And there was a reason for this, and that was simply that the warlords had access to a vastly, vastly, vastly better diet. And the critical thing which allows a soldier to become big and strong and muscular and huge, of course, is access to animal protein. And animal protein was a scarce, scarce resource in the Bronze Age world. So, well, warlords and kings and guys like Odysseus and Ajax would have been able to feast on animal protein every night and develop massive bodies and then produce really healthy offspring with powerful bodies. Well, your common grunt foot soldier who might have got access to animal protein maybe once, twice, three or four times in an entire fortnight, well, that kind of a soldier would have been much smaller and weaker just because of diet. Next, of course, the warlord heroes going into battle would have been trained all of their life in the use of weapons and military tactics. So according to the common foot soldiers, it would have looked as though what the warlords in the battlefield of Troy were doing was heroic and unnatural and amazing. Well, what's the difference between how those of us who go out and play a little bit of pickup football look compared to NFL quarterbacks? There's a little bit of a difference in our game and it comes down to the quality of training and instruction we have received. So the same thing was true in the battlefield. So the Bronze Age warlords that would have gone into battle would have been huge and they would have been really, really skilled. In terms of their armor, it would have been made out of bronze, which as I've told you in an earlier episode was an alloy of copper and tin. A typical Bronze Age warlord like Odysseus would have gone into battle armed with greaves, which were bronze shin guards. He would have had a bronze breast and back plate and then he would have had a bronze helmet. The rest of his armor actually wouldn't have been bronze. It would have been comprised of thick layers of hammered leather, often ox hide, and that's what he would have used to protect him. Now he might have carried a huge shield, either a figure of eight or a tower shield, which would have been the entire length and width of his body to protect him from attack. And he would have slung that shield over his shoulder. Now bronze was heavy. So one of the things that you'll see inside of the Iliad is that most of the Homeric heroes, they either had a shield or if they didn't have a shield, they had a breast and back plate, but rarely did they have both because it was just too darn heavy. The other option, of course, is you could have some guy as your shield bearer who would carry your heavy shield around for you, which was the ultimate of protection and luxury if you could afford it. As to their weapons, well, what a Homeric hero would have carried was two weapons. He would have had a bronze long sword, and then he would have had a spear, which would have been composed out of wood, hard ash, hardwood, and with a lethally sharp bronze tip. Now the bronze swords, we have to be careful here. We have an image of what a sword looks like, and we have an image of what heroes might look like if they go into battle and they're sword fighting. It involves thrusting and parrying, sort of like in an Errol Flynn movie, and that image is regrettably inaccurate for the Bronze Age. Bronze was a relatively brittle metal relative to later metals that were going to come along to make swords in the Iron Age. As a consequence, a bronze sword was capable of thrusting or jabbing, but it was certainly not capable of parrying because if you did much parrying with a bronze sword, well, it had this annoying habit of snapping at the hilt, which rendered the weapon useless. So Homeric heroes and Homeric real soldiers actually much preferred to use the spear as their main weapon of fighting because you could use it to either throw, or more importantly, you could use it to thrust and stab from a safe distance from your enemy. So that was the primary weapon of a Homeric hero. Now in terms of how they got around the battlefield, there was talk, of course, of chariots, and chariots show up prominently inside of Homer's Iliad. An idea of what a chariot was is the chariots were very simple. They had two wooden wheels, and then the body of the chariot where you carried the rider was likely composed out of leather or wicker. It was a very simple, modest affair, and a chariot was pulled by a team of two horses. They were all two-horse chariots except for one exceptional anomalous chariot pulled by Achilles who had a three-horsepower machine. But the real chariots of Troy were two-horsepower chariots pulled by two horses and guided by a chariot driver and then ridden by one of these warlord kings. Now most of the time all the chariots were used for inside of Bronze Age fighting was to convey the hero warriors from point A to point B in the battlefield as quickly as possible onto the common foot soldiers or the grunts. It's important when we talk about them to recognize that the overwhelming majority of people who fought at Troy were common foot soldiers or grunts. If you take all the characters that Homer makes mention to inside of the Iliad, it still works out to closer to five to one percent of the entire hundred thousand armies. So most of the people doing the fighting there were foot soldiers, and it's important to recognize that in the Bronze Age there were not paid professional armies of any large scale. So these guys that were the cannon fodder on the battlefield on both sides inside of Troy and inside of the Greek army were essentially farmers, fishermen, or businessmen who had basically got conscripted into this war on what they thought was going to be a very short-term venture. And these guys were poorly fed, they were never ever trained, and they arrived completely inadequately armed, protected, or weaponed to the battlefield. The purpose of them was to move them around the field as pawns and use just their sheer volume and strength to do the killing and dying that way while the warlords and the heroes figured out the tactics. So a typical foot soldier would have been some guy who had signed up for what he thought would be a four-week chance to win a few quick bucks in treasure or loot or booty from Troy and then go back home, and he wouldn't have been able to afford bronze armor. So he would have been wearing, if he was lucky, ox hide in the form of maybe a leather kilt, or maybe he would have had some sort of a leather helmet if he was lucky. And aside from that, almost all of his gear would have consisted of linen, and linen of course is singularly ineffective at stopping the thrusts of javelin or the points of arrow. So that's all you had. And in terms of a huge shield, well that wasn't a possibility because bronze was so expensive. So one of these warriors, one of these poor cannon fodder foot soldier warriors, well maybe he would have managed to hammer together a few pieces of leather and stiffened it and reinforced the rim with bronze, but that was about it. That's all that he had. In terms of his weapons, well maybe he would have found a cheap hand-me-down bronze sword, but if he would, it wouldn't have been very good and it wouldn't have been very sharp. He likely would have manufactured himself some form of a javelin out of ash from the local forest, and maybe, maybe, maybe it would have had a metal tip, but by and large it might have equally just had a sharpened wooden tip. And outside of that, well it was whatever looks like you could use it to kill or fight that he'd picked up on the family farm. So there would have been clubs, there would have been axes, there would have been slings, there would have been bows and arrows, a wide assortment of everyday weapons. And the primary thing that a foot soldier inside of this melee would have done was, number one, avoid getting wounded because wounds were usually fatal, and number two, as the battle went on, if you saw an opportunity, well improve your kit by stripping the corpses of enemy or friendly forces to maybe improve your armor or get a slightly better weapon before the next skirmish began. On to one final thing that I need to talk about, and that is of course injury, death on the battlefield, because it was all too common in the Bronze Age. The sad reality folks is that there were no anesthetics, there was no understanding of human anatomy or medicine, there were no painkillers, and so even a minor flesh wound by 21st century standards was often a long, slow, but inevitable death sentence inside of a Bronze Age battle. An arrow wound, the arrows that the Trojans used we know were barbed, so once it went in it didn't come out with inflicting a lot of damage. And the Trojans we also know dipped their arrowheads in whatever kind of lethal or noxious substance they could find on hand to try to increase suffering and misery and the chance of death, so we know that they dipped them in the venom of serpents if they could find it, or in open wounds or sores from dead soldiers, or sometimes we're told to even dip them into human fecal matter, anything they could to make the arrow a really, really nasty, nasty wound. So if you got hit by an arrow, or if you sustained so much as a puncture wound, or God forbid an internal injury, well you were likely done for in the battlefield in this particular war. So every night under a flag of truce and after the armies had retreated, unarmed soldiers from both sides would have come out onto the day's battlefield and removed the dead from both sides and built massive funeral pyres and the day's dead would have been burned before they began to rot or fester in that particular battlefield. So life of the common foot soldier on the battlefields of Troy, once those battles got up and running, was very short, very nasty, very ugly and very brief. And that's likely a very, very good point for us to leave this particular episode. I promised you at the end of the story part that an event was going to happen which was actually going to precipitate the war and we were actually going to get the Greeks and the Trojans into battle. That particular magic event that's going to move out of siege stage into open warfare stage is only one episode away. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to say goodbye now, have a wonderful day. Head over to my website trojanwarepodcast.com where the next episode and the actual end of siege warfare and the beginning of real combat will begin on our very next episode. And just before I say my goodbyes, ladies and gentlemen, just a quick reminder that now would be the absolutely ideal time to head over to my website trojanwarepodcast.com and donate your own little bit of gold, silver or copper coinage to my Performer's Cup. Have yourselves an awesome day.