82 Conquest
asks why “all men look on us as if we were gods” and why “we are awarded a
great estate by the banks of Xanthos, with land well-suited to orchards and
vines, and ploughland fit for bearing wheat.” To the questions posed, he has
a ready answer. “It is incumbent on us,” he tells Glaukos, “to take our stand
among the Lycians out in front and do our part in the heat of battle, so that a
man of the Lycians, thick-laid with armor, may say of us, ‘Indeed, not without
glory and renown are those who hold sway in Lycia, these kings of ours who
feast upon fat sheep and drink choice sweet wine, since indeed in them there
is strength of courage, for they fight among the Lycians out front.’ ” Sarpedon’s
analysis of the role he and Glaukos must play as prómachoı should give us
pause, for it not only captures perfectly the imperatives driving aristocratic
societies of a martial cast. It also instructs succeeding generations in that ethos.
For in societies where books possess great moral authority, as Homer’s Iliad
undoubtedly did, life is as apt to imitate literature as literature, life. In antiq-
uity, the conduct of war was powerfully influenced—if not, in fact, governed—
by the elaborate code of honor reflected in the Iliad and inculcated by it.^47
Homer’s prómachoı may in some measure be creatures of fantasy, literally
and figuratively larger than life. But they continued in later years to loom large
in the Hellenic imagination. Greek vase painters found it impossible to depict
with any accuracy a formation of infantrymen in serried ranks, bunched
shoulder to shoulder in close array within each file; and rarely did they even
try to do so. Instead—no doubt to the delight of those of their well-heeled,
well-born patrons, who had been reared on epic tales of derring-do—they
devoted themselves to representing warriors in individual combat. Well be-
fore the Persian wars, however, the world of the prómachos and of individual
combat more generally had, in practice, all but disappeared. There may have
been a bit of skirmishing for old times’ sake between the lines just before a
battle began, and there could well be considerable fighting of this sort in its
wake. But by the early fifth century we know that except in unusual circum-
stances—when they had to engage in combat on rough, uneven ground un-
suited to heavy infantry—the Greeks brought matters to a decision not by
squaring off as individual champions but by engaging in combat arrayed in a
phalanx. Generally, they lined up in files eight men deep—deployed in such a
manner that combat avoidance was well-nigh impossible—with the individ-
ual soldiers, who came to be called hoplites, brandishing thrusting spears eight
feet in length and bearing round, interlocking shields in such a fashion as to
form something resembling a wall.^48