Conquest 81
invariably dismount and fight on foot. There are indications in his text sug-
gesting an awareness on their part of the advantages associated with marshal-
ing one’s forces. Moreover, when cornered at the trench and palisade protect-
ing the ships they had drawn up along the beach, the Achaeans are forced to
crowd together, and they do briefly fight shoulder to shoulder to good effect
in close array. This they do again when they struggle to prevent the Trojans
from dragging off Patrocles’ corpse. In open-field combat, however, Homer’s
heroes operate as aristocratic “forefighters [prómachoı],” strutting about be-
fore a multitude constituted by their own retainers, then surging forward to
hurl javelins and wield thrusting spears and swords in hit-and-run attacks.^45
It is possible that, in these passages, Homer is repeating an account of
infantry battle that was passed down from bard to bard from quite distant
times. But the discrepancy between his account of the use of chariots and what
we know concerning actual chariot warfare in late Bronze Age Egypt and
western Asia suggests that something has been lost in transmission, that he is
for the most part depicting the infantry tactics of much more recent times,
and that, in describing chariots and their use, he is giving us an adaptation of
what he knows regarding the manner in which aristocrats in his time made
their way by chariot or on horseback to sites of conflict and, perhaps after
skirmishing, dismounted to hurl javelins at one another and close with thrust-
ing spear and sword.^46
It is, of course, conceivable that Homer’s treatment of open-field combat
chiefly as a struggle between individual grandees operating as prómachoı is a
distortion of the reality of combat, reflective of the demands of the epic genre
within which he is writing. After all, mass combat, which was known as early
as the third millennium in Mesopotamia, lends itself less readily to dramatic
personal confrontations than face-offs between individual heroes. Here, how-
ever, we should not underestimate the degree to which, within an aristocratic
society, prowess of the very sort described in the Iliad was, in practice, de-
manded of men born to high rank who were intent on asserting and retaining
their prerogatives. There may well be evidence in Homer allowing us to infer
an occasional resort to mass combat, but there is no indication that forming
up in a disciplined phalanx was central to the Homeric way of war.
The moral horizon of the poem is also telling. In the Iliad, Homer’s Sarpe-
don wonders out loud why, in Lycia whence they have come to help defend
Troy, he and his friend Glaukos son of Hippolochos “are honored before oth-
ers with pride of place, meats, and beakers of wine filled to the brim”; and he