here functioned as a means of transport for warriors who fought not from the
vehicle but on the ground with close-range weapons—a role determined to
a large extent by the nature of the terrain.^65Why the nature of the terrain kept an archer from shooting arrows from the
chariot, but allowed the chariot to carry an infantryman wherever he was needed
has never, so far as I know, been explained. Jan Driessen made the good
observation that the 250 chariots of Knossos could not have defended outlying
parts of the kingdom because no suitable road system had been built in the LM
period. He attempted, however, to salvage the battle-taxi thesis with the proposal
that the chariots of Knossos and Pylos—meant only to defend the land close by
the unwalled palaces—would have done so by transporting heavily armored
warriors to the front where attackers were advancing toward the palace. The
chariots, that is, would have delivered a “wall of bronze” to make up for the lack
of a Cyclopean wall around the palace.^66
Wherever one imagines the taxis depositing their warriors, it is difficult to
imagine in what sort of battles, and against what sort of enemy, so tiny and so
lumbering an infantry would have been effective, each man arriving at the scene
in his own taxi. Nor can one imagine what would have happened had King
Attarissiya brought to Anatolia 100 such chariots, and 100 such infantrymen, and
had then been confronted by the chariotry sent from Hattusha, each Hittite chariot
carrying an archer armed with a composite bow. I suspect that most of Attarissiya’s
horses would have been hit long before his chariots reached a place at which the
infantrymen were to be unloaded.
Service as taxis for warriors who fought hand-to-hand is of course the role
assigned to chariots in the Iliad. How such a role may have materialized in the
epic tradition was suggested by P. A. L. Greenhalgh. When troops were mustering
early in the Archaic period, Greenhalgh pointed out, many of the basileiscame
to the mustering ground on horseback, and he suggested that in the Geometric
period—when riding was still uncommon—chariots may have provided the
basileiswith the impressive transport they desired.^67 In the Late Bronze Age,
however, the age of chariot warfare, chariots as taxis for infantrymen make no
sense. It does not help to cite Julius Caesar’s account (De bello Gallico4. 32–33)
of his invasion of Britain, more than 1000 years later in the evolution of military
weapons and tactics. Caesar reported that some of the British warriors rode in
chariots toward his legionaries, then leaped off and fought on the ground. The
British warriors may have given Caesar’s swordsmen some grief, but neither the
Britons nor their horses would have fared well against arrows shot from composite
bows 100 m away.
Here we must examine the belief that the corselets shown in ideograms on the
Linear B tablets, and exemplified by the famous Dendra corselet, were not worn
by the chariot crew but were designed for men who fought hand-to-hand on the
ground. Homer, first of all, imagined his heroes as quite agile or even fleet of foot
(as, incidentally, were the British riders who leaped off their chariots and rushed
upon Caesar’s legionaries), and not as wearing something so cumbersome as the
Militarism in Greece 189