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The Iliad and Odyssey have shaped Western ideas of heroism for nearly three millennia. Yet despite centuries of debate over whether they reflect historical reality or poetic fantasy, the Homeric world remains an internally consistent universe worth studying on its own terms. This isn’t about separating fact from fiction: it’s about understanding the warrior ethos that dominated the ancient Greek and Roman imagination, and how battles were truly fought in the world of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus.
The release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in cinemas has led to a resurgence in public interest in the original source material. In ancient Greece, the epic poem Odyssey, which tells of the difficult voyage home from the Trojan War by Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, was attributed to a poet called Homer. This same Homer is generally thought to have also been responsible for the Odyssey’s prequel, the Iliad, which is set during the tenth and final year of the Greek war against the Anatolian city of Troy. The Iliad’s main focus is the hero Achilles, who fights and kills Troy’s main protector, Hector, thereby clearing the way for Troy’s ultimate defeat. Ancient tradition attributed both poems to Homer (ca. 700 B.C.), although modern scholars disagree over their authorship, composition, and relationship to one another.
The epic poems are, first and foremost, fantastical tales. The heroes who populate the world sketched by Homer lived many generations before Homer’s own time. When the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822 to 1890) conducted his excavations at Mycenae and Tiryns, in Greece, he unearthed the remains of a society that predated the classical Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. by about 1,000 years.
Back then, many believed that this earlier society, which was highly developed, with kings who ruled from fortified citadels, could be equated with the world described in Homer’s epic poems. Today, few archaeologists and historians believe this to still be true: There are simply too many differences — material as well as societal — between the world described by Homer and that of the historical Bronze Age. The epics contain elements that seem to date back to the Mycenaean era (e.g., personal names, geography, certain pieces of equipment such as boars’ tusk helmets), but other parts are clearly later and may instead belong to Homer’s own time (e.g., the practice of cremation, four-horse chariots).
This article does not seek to untangle fact from fiction in the Homeric epics. I have done that already elsewhere. Instead, I want to treat the epic world as an entity worth studying in its own right. For the Greeks of the classical era, as well as their Roman heirs, the Homeric epics were considered the height of civilized culture and a fundamental part of any privileged person’s formal education. They considered them historical. More importantly, they believed that the poems included valuable rules with regard to social conduct and honor that were worth pursuing. In particular, the warrior ethos espoused by Homer would essentially form the dominant warrior ethos throughout the Greek and Roman world. Of course, this ethos was an ideal, something worth striving for, not necessarily something that was always followed to the letter.
The epic world described by Homer is internally consistent. It consists of a number of larger and smaller, more or less autonomous regions. Each of these contains a number of towns, and at least one is large enough to be referred to as a city. The central settlement is the home of a hereditary ruler who is widely accepted as being in charge of the region as a whole. The population can be divided into four social groups. At the top are the basileis (“princes”), of which one serves as the supreme ruler of the region as a whole; they are usually referred to as “kings” in translations. The bulk of the population consists of farmers (smallholders), as well as a fairly small group of skilled specialists (craftsmen, including smiths and bards). Less easy to quantify are the lower two strata of society, which consist of slaves (douloi) as well as hired laborers (thētes). When the shade of the slain Achilles wants to drive home how miserable his existence in the underworld is, it is the fate of the thētes rather than the slave that he reaches for.
In the epic poems, nearly all of the main characters belong to the basileis, and many are indeed kings in their own right. Achilles is the son of Peleus, ruler of the Myrmidons. Odysseus is the king of Ithaca. Diomedes, noted for his youth as well as his strength, is the king of Argos. The rulers are supported by influential basileis referred to as the gerontes or “Elders.” The basileis who are prominent within a sovereign region are referred to collectively as the “leaders and councillors.” The basileis consider themselves a better kind of people; they are the aristoi, the “best” that a community has to offer. The word aristocracy (rule of the best) is Greek in origin and was used in later Greek political theory to refer specifically to governance by an elite group of families.
Unsurprisingly, the basileis are among the most powerful as well as the most affluent people within epic society. They claim illustrious ancestors and emphasize their wealth by hoarding treasure, keeping horses (an animal that was not used in farming in ancient Greece), participating in games, and organizing lavish feasts. Since social interactions in the epic world are horizontal rather than vertical, there is not much interaction between the basileis and the people they govern. During meetings on important matters, discussion is usually between members of the aristocracy. Indeed, only basileis may have been allowed to speak at all. The common people — the dēmos — may be present, and they may voice their agreement or discontent, but they are not considered to be of much account. The common people had to pay a particular tax (the “wine of the elders”), but were, on the other hand, also placated by the sacrifices organized by the basileis. During these sacrifices, in which animals were slaughtered, the common people were able to join in. These would have been rare occasions to eat meat.
In the ancient world, those who wielded political power also held military authority. For the epic world, the basileis not only ruled their individual territories — they were also in control of their armies. In the Iliad in particular, the basileis are specifically said to be decisive in combat: they fight in the front rows as promachoi (“front-rank fighters”), exposing themselves to the thick of the battle at great personal risk. The mass of the people is said to be inconsequential.
Of course, we are dealing here with what is essentially elite propaganda: The Homeric poems were created specifically for an aristocratic audience, and as such, the success of a military engagement was attributed solely to the inspired warcraft of society’s exalted leaders. Naturally, in a real conflict, the outcome is not decided by a few handfuls of well-equipped leaders, but rather by masses of combatants on either side. It is useful to keep this thought in the back of the mind.
In the epic world, war is endemic. Achilles’ famous shield, forged by the god Hephaestus and described in loving detail in Book 18 of the Iliad, features two cities: one is at peace and showcases a wedding and a law case, while the other is besieged by a rival army and features an ambush and a battle. Interestingly, there are no examples of wars fought solely with the aim of conquering territory. The fate of Troy itself is instructive here: Once the Greeks manage to enter the city, the entire place is razed to the ground, and the population is either killed outright or enslaved. The territory is not added to Agamemnon’s domain. Indeed, this is a pattern throughout the epic poems. For economic purposes, as well as to attain glory, the Greeks frequently engage in raids against various towns to acquire various resources. The towns themselves are usually sacked and destroyed. No attempt is ever made to gain a permanent foothold there.
Raiding is common in the epic world, and the primary means by which the Greek army at Troy sustains itself. Tit-for-tat raiding is common. In many cases, it seems to be limited in scope. Nestor tells a story in Book 11 of the Iliad of how his father, Neleus, ruler of Pylos, once sent a chariot to compete in games organized at Elis. However, the Epeians stole the vehicle, angering the Pylians. In retaliation, the young Nestor led a party on an expedition in Epeian territory where they stole a large amount of livestock and made a few prisoners. However, violent retaliation is not always the only avenue open to the basileis. In Book 21 of the Odyssey, we learn that the people of Messene had once stolen 300 sheep from Ithaca. Rather than mount a punitive raid into Messenian territory, a young Odysseus was sent on a diplomatic mission to ask for suitable compensation for the theft instead. The story doesn’t actually make clear if Odysseus was successful, but considering the context, he probably was.
At least in the context of the epic world, the main cause of outright war appears to be something quite basic: an insult. The immediate cause of the Trojan War isn’t anything that appeals to modern filmmakers, apparently. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey gestures at trade routes in a way not too dissimilar from Wolfgang Petersen’s earlier movie Troy (2004). But nowhere in the epic poems do such practical, modern concerns surface as the cause of the war itself. No, the main cause was the wounded honor (timē) of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. He had hosted Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, and what was his thanks? The young prince ran off with Helen, Menelaus’ wife, as well as a large number of valuables looted from Menelaus’ palace. This was a violation of the sacred rules of xenia (hospitality), and thus an insult not only to Menelaus personally, but an affront to the gods themselves.
You might be wondering why a conflict between Sparta and Troy would escalate to include all of Greece. The reason for this lies with Helen herself. The Catalogue of Women, a poem attributed to Hesiod, Homer’s contemporary, but actually dating to the sixth century B.C., tells the tale. As the world’s most beautiful woman, nearly every man in Greece had wanted her hand in marriage. On the advice of Odysseus, her father, Tyndareus of Sparta, told her suitors that she would decide who to marry, and had every ruler in Greece swear that they would not only honor her choice, but defend and protect the suitor of her choice. Thus, when Paris made off with Helen, Menelaus demanded that the oath be kept, and so all of Greece, united under the command of Agamemnon, the most powerful ruler of them all, would set off to wage war against Troy.
When a leader sets off for war, the first thing he does is take his own immediate group of followers along with him. These followers are referred to in the epics as hetairoi (“companions”). They are ubiquitous in the poems. Some of these companions are regarded as philoi (“friends”): Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion, is a good example of this. They were considered so close that Greeks of the classical era (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.) considered them to be lovers, but there is little evidence for this in the Iliad itself. Other companions are referred to as therapōntes, which is sometimes translated as “retainers” or “henchmen.” In a few cases, these appear to be men who live in their leader’s house, but not always; in many cases, hetairos and therapōn are used as synonyms.
Outside of their immediate followers, the Iliad makes it clear that most families in a community were supposed to supply one warrior each. Hermes, posing as one of Achilles’ therapōntes, tells Priam, the king of Troy, that he and his six brothers cast lots to decide who was to follow Achilles to Troy. Achilles himself came to Troy in the place of his father, King Peleus, and made it clear that he did so as a favor (chairēs) to Agamemnon, as he explains early on in Book 1 of the Iliad. Peleus himself was too old to go into battle, apparently, and Achilles was his only son; there were no brothers around to cast lots. There does not seem to have been a specific obligation to answer Agamemnon’s call to war, since we hear, for example, of a certain Echepolus, son of Anchises, who gave Agamemnon a beautiful mare, “so as not to have to go with him to windy Ilion but stay where he was and enjoy himself.” An outright refusal would have incurred Agamemnon’s wrath: a gift is the tried-and-true way of softening the blow.
It is clear from the poems that most men had to provide their own arms and armor. The arming scenes give a good idea of what the panoply of a Homeric warrior looks like. There is a lot of variety in materials, but greaves, cuirasses, and crested helmets — all made of metal, mostly bronze, except for the rare linen corslet — are common. The heroes also use shields for defense: in many cases, these appear to be round and often covered by a metal sheet. As far as weapons are concerned, the warriors typically carry two spears into battle, used for both thrusting and throwing without much of a distinction made between true javelins (for throwing) and lances (for thrusting). The heroes are also equipped with a sidearm in the form of a bronze sword.
Bows are always in the hands of skilled specialists: the Hollywood notion that the bow is a simple weapon is patently false. In the epic world, at least, all bows appear to be composite bows. Book 4 of the Iliad features a detailed description of it, stressing its (re)curved appearance. Of all the weapons used in the epics, the composite bow would have required the most training and therefore the most free time available. It plays a crucial role in the denouement of the Odyssey, and Odysseus himself is shown to be a deft archer. Of course, since archers fight from a distance, they are sometimes decried as cowards. For example, when Diomedes, the king of Argos, is hit in the foot by one of Paris’ arrows, he shrugs it off and calls the Trojan prince a toxotēs (simply “archer”) by way of an insult. Of course, an allied archer would be the subject of praise: see, for example, Agamemnon’s glazing of Teucer.
While each warrior typically brought their own equipment, it could be that some men were equipped at their leader’s expense. Odysseus’ palace, for example, features a storeroom filled with treasure and weapons. When Odysseus starts his slaughter of the suitors towards the end of the story, his son Telemachus runs off to an inner room to fetch weapons. There is even a curious moment in the Iliad where the Greeks are told to exchange shields and spears so that the braver fighters who bore the brunt of the combat could replace their battered and broken equipment with the more pristine arms and armor used by those who clearly did not fight in the front ranks.
On the Greek side, the commander-in-chief of the army as a whole is Agamemnon, the ruler of Mycenae. He is frequently referred to as the anax andron, the “lord of men.” He relies on the advice of his fellow kings, most notably the elderly Nestor, king of Pylos. He calls assemblies to discuss important matters with the other basileis, and at least some of the bulk of the army can be present at these meetings, although they appear to have little say. On the Trojan side, the commander-in-chief is nominally Priam, the king of Troy, but due to his advanced age, the actual battlefield commander is his son Hector, who is assisted by other leaders, including the commanders of allied troops, such as Aeneas, Sarpedon, and Glaucus. The men on both sides are organized into regional contingents, each commanded by their own leaders. Hence, Achilles leads the Myrmidons, Odysseus the Ithacans, Diomedes the Argives, and so on. Agamemnon himself commands the army, but otherwise is directly responsible for the troops from Mycenae.
When it comes to understanding the epic world, we owe a great debt to the fundamental work of Hans van Wees, in particular his PhD thesis, Status Warriors (1992), which has had a tremendous influence on the work of many scholars, including my own doctoral research. With regard to Homeric warfare, Van Wees argued that it consisted of fluid fighting by loosely ordered bodies of men, punctuated by dense local formations and leadership by aristocratic front-rank fighters. Other scholars place greater emphasis on collective formation fighting or on the poems’ mixture of practices from different periods; these latter interpretations have largely, I believe, fallen to the wayside.
A cursory read of the Iliad might suggest that Homeric warfare consists of disorganized skirmishing; a brawl rather than a battle. But a more careful reading of the source material makes clear that the fighting is not a free-for-all. On the battlefield, armies themselves are organized along fairly simple lines. Different words are used, not always consistently, to refer to bodies of men within the army. The term phalanx is used to denote battle lines, often a throng of men, rather than a neat arrangement in squares. The term styx — always in the plural, styches — is used to denote both ranks and files of men, as well as large bodies of men, or, indeed, of horses. Sometimes the term purgos (“tower”) denotes a dense group of warriors. None of these terms seem to refer to a specific military unit or formation, however.
A more meaningful distinction exists between fighters engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy and those who do not. The former are denoted as promachoi or protoi — people who fight out front — whereas the ones who hold back are referred to simply as the plethus (“multitude”) or laos (“people”), the mass of fighters who might throw or shoot projectiles, but otherwise keep their distance until some grow bold enough to venture into the front ranks. The exception is archers, who sometimes, from behind the cover of a friend’s shield, take down enemy troops like a modern-day sniper; volley fire is rare.
The different regional contingents who fight at Troy operate as flexible units: warbands consisting of a leader and their followers. A basileus may decide to carve up his own contingent into different, smaller sections (stiches). This practice is mentioned exactly once in the Iliad, when Achilles divides his Myrmidons into five different groups, each with its own leader, but there is no reason to assume this is exceptional.
In the Iliad, there is a strong emphasis on cooperation on the battlefield. The Greeks are specifically said to be better at working together than the Trojans and their allies; in the latter case, cooperation might be more difficult on account of the different languages that they speak. This could be regarded as a very early example of the dichotomy between organized “Greeks” and disorganized “Asiatics” that would become a stereotype after the Persian Wars, in particular.
The core operating unit on the epic battlefield is the leader and his followers: the warband, for want of a better term. Homer sometimes uses the term lochos. The leaders all use the fast, two-wheeled chariot as a mode of conveyance to get them quickly into and off the battlefield, usually pulled by a team of either two or four horses. They normally never fight from the chariot. The bulk of their followers march and fight on foot. They consist mostly of spearmen, but can include at least some archers, and possibly horsemen (the ephemeral hippeis that are often mentioned in the Iliad but lack much prominence in the descriptions of the fighting). The men do not maneuver in formation; they are described as advancing upon the enemy in “waves”: a particular inspired description is found in Book 4 of the Iliad. Whatever formations do appear seem to arise spontaneously and are always used defensively — that is to say, statically, rather than offensively.
It is not quite clear how large we should imagine the typical warband to be. The size appears to have been flexible. The warships that set sail for Troy typically had a crew of around 50 men, who served as rowers as well as fighters when the vessel was beached. It seems likely that this would have been the size of a typical warband: the captain of the vessel would be the commander of its crew also on land, as shown repeatedly in the Odyssey. When the Greeks post sentries to keep an eye on the Trojans, each leader is given command of 100 troops. I earlier referred to Achilles dividing his own contingent into five units: the text makes clear that each of these units consists of 500 men, or the crews of 10 ships each. Given the difficulties of communicating on the battlefield in an era before walkie-talkies, such large groups must have been subdivided into smaller units.
The Trojan War was foretold to last 10 years before being concluded. There is therefore no real attempt to assault the walls of Troy, bar a few tries by Patroclus in Book 16 of the Iliad, and the city itself is famously captured only by way of the ruse with the wooden horse. There is no interest on the Greek side, for whatever reason, to try and cut off the Trojan lines of supply or communication. No attempt is made to starve the Trojans into submission. Instead, much of the fighting in the Iliad takes the form of open-field or pitched battles. The two sides meet at the plain in between the Greek camp and the city of Troy, through which runs the Scamander River. The fighting starts early in the morning and typically lasts the entire day. When night falls, the fighting is supposed to cease: heralds of both sides will remind the warriors of this if they do not stop, as shown in Book 7 of the Iliad. (The night expedition of Diomedes and Odysseus in Book 10 is essentially an ad hoc reconnaissance mission, not a large nocturnal engagement.)
The fighting itself is fierce; the ground typically gets soaked in blood, and a lot of dust is kicked up. Warriors are killed in horrific ways. For example, when Agamemnon kills the Trojan Hippolochus, he cuts off his arms and kicks the body into the mass of fighters, rolling “like a log.” Another Greek, Peneleus, kills a Trojan by spearing him in the face, beheading him, and then lifting the severed head high into the air, causing the Trojans to tremble in fear. The fiercest battles are fought around the bodies of fallen comrades. In German literature, these battles are referred to as Leichenkämpfe, and they are a recurring feature in the Iliad. After Patroclus has been cut down by Hector, many Greeks gather around the corpse and form a kind of shield wall — the poet refers to it as a “fence” — to keep the assailants at bay.
When a warrior has fallen, the aim of the enemy is to try and secure the body so they can strip it of its armor — the allies try to drag the body back behind friendly lines. At one point, Hector and Aeneas chase off a number of Greek fighters, with the poet adding that “Many fine pieces of armour littered the ground on both sides of the ditch, as the Danaans fled.” Naturally, enemy horses and chariots were taken whenever the opportunity arose. Arms and armor were valuable pieces of equipment. After Hector slays Patroclus, he takes his armor, which had originally belonged to Achilles: the armor was the physical manifestation of his timē (“honor”) and a reminder of the kleos (“glory”) he earned by killing the young hero. The armor also infused him with strength: the poem says that when Hector put on the armor, “Ares the dangerous war god entered him, so that the inward body was packed full of force and fighting strength.”
When the fighting has stopped, each side collects its dead, attempts to identify the remains, and cremates the bodies. The burnt remains are collected when the fires die down and buried close to the battlefield. The sage Nestor at one point suggests collecting the bones of the fallen to return to Greece once the war is over. For at least the most highly regarded fallen warriors, their compatriots organize funeral games. These games are another way for warriors to attain kleos (“glory”), since they involve various competitive contests, ranging from chariot races to mock battles that end the moment blood has been drawn.
Elderly men like Priam and Nestor generally do not take direct part in the fighting. Most of the combatants seem to have been young men. In keeping with other written texts from ancient Greece, the death of a young man is idealized, while an old man’s death is pitied. In Book 22 of the Iliad, Priam laments:
A young man it beseemeth wholly, when he is slain in battle, that he lie mangled by the sharp bronze; dead though he be, all is honourable whatsoever be seen. But when dogs work shame upon the hoary head and hoary beard and on the nakedness of an old man slain, lo, this is the most piteous thing that cometh upon wretched mortals.
The ancient Greek afterlife did not promise eternal happiness. Instead, the warriors in Homer’s epic sought to immortalize themselves through their deeds by attaining kleos (“glory”). In Book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles explains that his divine mother Thetis once told him that his life could have gone one of two ways. He could have refused the call to go to war against Troy, remained where he was, and lived out a long life. But this would have come at the cost of his esthlos (“excellence”) and his kleos (“glory”): he would be forgotten soon after his death. His other, greater destiny was to come to Troy, fight against the Trojans, and eventually die there, but his glory would have been everlasting. And indeed, despite the lamentations of Achilles’ shade noted earlier, we still know who Achilles is, millennia after the Iliad was originally set to papyrus.
Josho Brouwers, PhD, specializes in war, violence, and society in the ancient Aegean. He is the editor-in-chief of Ancient World Magazine.
Image: Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons
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