The Trojan War by Barry Strauss Page B

waiting for him. He would probably have aimed his spear at a seam in Protesilaus’s armor or at his neck or at an unprotected part of his face, all common places for a weapon to penetrate and cause a fatal wound.
    The great Achilles had thought about jumping ashore first, but held back because he believed that the first Greek to land at Troy would be killed. He had been warned by his divine mother, Thetis—which may be another way of saying that even tough guys go with their gut feelings sometimes. And so the war had its first combat casualty, which led to the first widow. At home in the city of Phylace, Protesilaus left a wife to tear her cheeks in a sign of mourning.
    The men in the Trojan vanguard might have tried to push their way onto the enemy ships or at least to hoist themselves up high enough to grab the ornament off the sternpost as a trophy. Anyone brave enough to try would surely face a rain of enemy arrows and spears and perhaps be hacked at with swords.
    It must have been a hard-fought battle and yet we don’t hear a word about the role of the ordinary soldier in it. We can be sure that he was in the thick of things. When it comes to the rank and file, the silence of the sources and the clamor of reality are typical of the Bronze Age. Hittite and Egyptian texts, for example, often tell the story of a battle the same way: the Great King or pharaoh single-handedly defeats masses of enemy soldiers. An extreme case is the official Egyptian version of the battle of Qadesh: Pharaoh Rameses II killed so many Hittite soldiers that the plain of Qadesh became impassable from all the blood and corpses. Pharaoh had the help of the gods alone in this victory. In other words, the enemy is a crowd of common soldiers but our side has one divinely inspired hero.
    Homer and the other poets of the Epic Cycle take a similar approach. They focus on great warriors and their divine enablers, generally leaving it to the audience to fill in the experience of the masses. Although Homer does little to put a face on the battle experience of the rank and file, other sources of evidence allow educated guesses.
    Start with an Egyptian sculpted relief of the early 1100s depicting a sea battle near shore. It shows the damage that could be done by archers, whether aboard ship or posted ashore. The common man in Bronze Age armies was at risk because he had the flimsiest armor or none at all—sometimes he even lacked sandals. The dead fell, as the Egyptians said, as crocodiles fall into the water. Fighting their way ashore, the Greeks would have had to wade through corpses, often their own comrades.
    Once he got ashore, the Greek soldier might have aimed at his Trojan counterpart. Well-armored Trojan nobles made poor targets, but a Trojan commoner was a fair foil for the Greek’s spear or sword—if the Greek had one, and for his bare fists, if he didn’t. If they teamed up, a group of Greek privates might have captured a Trojan hero and held him for ransom, arms tied behind his back, just as one Greek common soldier boasts in one of Homer’s rare glimpses of the enlisted men. But surely more ordinary Greek soldiers fell at the hands of Trojan heroes.
    The Greeks were not certain of victory until Achilles—by now ashore—killed Cycnus, a Trojan ally who was inflicting big casualties on the Greeks. Cycnus is said to have had the superhuman power of a son of the god Poseidon, to use the Greek name; the Trojans might have known him as the Great Sea God. To declare someone no mere mortal but a god was a Bronze Age gesture of respect to the great and powerful.
    Achilles is said to have strangled Cycnus with the leather straps of Cycnus’s own helmet. Cycnus appears not in Homer but in the Epic Cycle. It is a less-reliable source, but Cycnus symbolizes both the Bronze Age and the little connection Troy had to the sea.
    Cycnus was king of the city of Colonae, located on the Aegean coast of the Troad about fifteen