Ambush Page 4

  the success of the ambush is the effect of planning, concealment and sometimes (but not always) superior numbers.

  While Edwards believes that the ambush illustrated the Homeric contrast of trickery (dolos) and force (kratos), I believe they illustrate two aspects of Greek warfare, not two ends of a moral spectrum.46 Both the Iliad and the Odyssey acknowledge the place of the ambush in the repertoire of battle stratagems. In view of Idomeneus’ speech and the comments of Achilles quoted above, it is clear that the Iliad conceives of the ambush as one aspect of heroic action. And as we shall see in chapter 3, the role of the ambush is central to the Odyssey. The continuity exhibited by the two poems suggests that the theme of the ambush was a conventional feature of the Greek epic tradition.

  The Value Judgements

  Whereas Edwards views ambush in the Iliad as a strategy employed by the weak and cowardly, when the Iliad discusses an actual ambush in real time we find that ambushers can be heroes, too.47 Too many scholars have made the generalisation that all ambushes are portrayed negatively and assert that the Greeks considered them to be cowardly, treacherous or, in Paris’ case, ‘womanly’ actions. Quite the contrary, Homer records an accurate view of what an ambush entails. He displays no moral taboo whatsoever against it, and sees it as something requiring courage and the best-trained men.48 Thus in Iliad 6.189 King Proteus sets an ambush using ‘the best men of Lycia’,49 and in the Odyssey Odysseus himself claims that Ares and Athena gave him the courage and strength that ‘breaks the ranks of men’, but that he chooses ‘the best warriors for an ambush’ [italics mine].50 Certainly they expect a soldier who wants to make a name for himself to win glory by fighting ‘like men’ face to face. In spite of these protestations, however, it is still a soldier’s job to ward off ‘treacherous ambushes’.

  The Wooden Horse

  While commentators continue to contrast the brave and honourable spearfighter to the sneaky and immoral ambusher, the fact remains that the great Trojan war ends in victory for the Greeks because of the most famous ambush in literature.51 The story of the wooden horse does not appear in the Iliad (although it may be alluded to at 15.69ff.), and it was probably part of a pre-Homeric tradition about Troy.52 The incident is mentioned three times in the Odyssey.53 It stands out as the greatest of Odysseus’ exploits at Troy and is identified with his heroism.54 The stratagem is the final action of the war. In The Little Iliad by Lesches, the story is told as follows:

  The Trojans are now closely besieged and Epeius, by Athena’s instruction, builds the Wooden Horse. Odysseus disguises himself and goes inside Ilium as a spy, and there being recognised by Helen, plots with her for the taking of the city; after killing certain Trojans, he returns to the ships … then after putting their best men into the Wooden Horse and burning their huts, the main body of the Hellenes sail to Tenedos. The Trojans, supposing their troubles are over, destroy a part of the city wall and take the Wooden Horse into their city and feast as though they had conquered the Hellenes.55

  The rest of the story is told by Arctinus in The Sack of Ilium, more or less as we know it, and also from Vergil’s Aeneid. Vergil gives us the fullest account we have of the ultimately successful nocturnal ambush tactics by which the Greeks finally sack Troy.56

  The Trojans were suspicious of the Wooden Horse and standing round it debated what they ought to do. Some thought they ought to hurl it down from the rocks, others to burn it up, while others said they ought to dedicate it to Athena. At last this third opinion prevailed. Then they turned to mirth and feasting believing the war was at an end … and those in the Wooden Horse came out and fell upon their enemies, killing many and storming the city.’57

  The Trojan war, where so many Achaeans won glory and fame as champions and fighters, is concluded, therefore, through an ambush. In the Odyssey’s proem [preface] we are told that Odysseus, along with the other Greeks, sacked Troy. It is the greatest of his victories and the wooden horse serves as the backdrop for the events following upon his return to Ithaca. Surely this belies Edwards’ characterisation of the ambush as ‘a tactic of only minor significance – suited to assassination or harassment’.58 How ironic also that, in the Odyssey, ambush is elevated to a magnitude exceeding all other deeds of strength and courage at Troy. If this is the tactic that will win the war, then the best thing to do is use it and win.

  The narrow view of ‘heroic combat’ has finally begun to be questioned in recent scholarship. Hans van Wees points out that, although the ideal of open and fair combat certainly exists in the Iliad, it seems to appear only in the formal duels, but not in the battle itself. For example, when Ajax is about to fight Hector he offers him the advantage of making the first move. Hector repays this compliment by warning Ajax to be on his guard: ‘I do not want to look for an opportunity to hit a great man like you by stealth, but will hit you openly if I can.’59 Duellists who decline such an advantage are not simply obeying some universal ‘heroic code’ but showing off their exceptional courage.60 Hector knows the temptations of stealth and guile. Ajax is so dangerous, the prospect of attacking him stealthily is extremely attractive. Heroes do not display such chivalry anywhere else in the Iliad, and poetic vision and heroic ideal are not reality. Quite different behaviour is expected of warriors in regular battle. There, one eliminates the enemy by whatever means possible and no one seems to insist that the fight be open or fair, except for the restriction that leaders fight leaders. Most fights take the form of hit-and-run attacks rather than face-to-face confrontations. According to van Wees, only about one in six of the fights described in the Iliad involve opponents who deliberately seek out one another, or at least stand their ground when they come face to face. Five out of six times when a warrior does fight in the Iliad, he attacks his opponent without warning, often catching him off-guard. The single most common action in the Iliad is a single shot or blow which kills an enemy who is evidently caught unawares. Some men are hit while still dismounting from their chariots. Others struggle with one opponent only to fall victim to another who creeps up on him unnoticed. In retreat and flight men are hit and stabbed in the back without any attempt to make them stand and fight. A few are slaughtered while in a helpless state of shock.61 Not only will a Homeric hero kill a man by stealth and surprise but he will also mock the man he has just killed and then strip and even mutilate the dead body. Warriors make jokes about the manner of the victim’s collapse62 or about what he can do with the spear that killed him.63 They mock his deluded hopes of victory and warn that his body will be savaged by wild dogs or vultures.64

  Ambush and Attitude in the Iliad

  It is clear from the examples we have given that the Iliad acknowledges the place of ambush in warfare. Homer’s heroes compete not only in open battle but also in ambushes and spying expeditions. Attacks by night can test bravery and strength as well as fleetness of foot and cunning intelligence of which Odysseus is the avatar.65 Homer’s warriors recognise the skill and bravery it takes to stage an ambush against the enemy, and they do not disdain such activities.66 Homer often uses ambush as an effective means for an outnumbered, isolated hero to fight a just combat against scheming, unethical adversaries.67 Using an ambush as a force multiplier is a well-known concept even in modern military strategy. In Homeric ambushes, the number of attackers and attacked is usually unequal, but the numerical advantage can be on either side and does not ensure success. As one recent study puts it: ‘The decision to undertake a spying mission or an ambush is often born of a situation of desperation or the need to defeat an enemy who was not or cannot be beaten in conventional battle.’68

  Although ambush is only one method in the repertoire of a warrior, it is the one that eventually wins the Trojan war. Ambush is certainly not what Edwards labels it: ‘a strategy employed by the weak and cowardly’.69 Facing an enemy in an ambush takes as much courage as facing an enemy while fighting in a massed formation. Lying in wait alone in an ambush may take even more courage. Most importantly, both methods are well attes
ted in Greek literature and each represents a facet of the historical ideology of Greek warfare.70 Indeed, the fighting in Homer was so varied, and the author endorses so many possible ways of fighting, that scholars could pick and choose whatever passages supported their theory.71 We must, however, view all the evidence. Looking at Greek epic tradition as a whole, and taking into account what we know of the now lost poems of the Epic Cycle, we find that there are no really discreet categories. Spearfighters such as Diomedes and Odysseus also traditionally excel at the kind of ambush warfare depicted in Iliad 10. Diomedes is a stellar fighter in the polemos, but he is equally good at the lochos (ambush). The sack of Troy is the ultimate night ambush, and both Odysseus and Diomedes are involved in several nighttime escapades leading up to and during its fall.

  When we look closer at the descriptions of war in Homer, therefore, what we see is a very realistic view of a useful military technique. Ambush missions achieve what conventional battle cannot.72 What we must avoid is the modern moralising about it, especially when it is based on stereotypes of Greek behaviour and attitudes.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Ill-fated Trojan Spy

  THE ENTIRE TENTH BOOK of Homer’s Iliad is the story of an ambush. A Trojan spy named Dolon is captured by Diomedes and Odysseus in one of the most famous intelligence operations in Greek literature.1 Yet scholars have not only ignored the importance of ambush in the story they have also condemned it.2 One study of the Doloneia, or ‘Story of Dolon’, refers to it as the ‘most doubted, ignored and even scorned book of the Epic’.3 The condemnation of the book has been almost universal until a recent study has resuscitated Iliad 10 so that it will ‘no longer lie buried below a cairn heaped up to keep its unclean spirit out of the Homeric World …’4 Another important task should be to liberate it from aesthetic judgements and intuitive responses that have nothing to do with the evidence of the poem or the realities of warfare.

  The Doloneia occupies a peculiar place in the Iliad because it is a complete incident in itself and could be removed from the epic without leaving any trace. Even ancient critics believed that the poem was a separate composition by Homer, and not included by him in the Iliad, but added to the epic later on.5 Modern scholars, too, have noted its lack of organic connection with the rest of the poem. Even the so-called ‘Unitarians’, i.e. those who believe the Iliad and Odyssey were composed by a single, literary genius named Homer, accept that it could have been a later addition.6 Bernard Fenik put the question to rest in 1988 when he showed that, however little the Iliad needed the Doloneia, the Doloneia had been definitely crafted to fit into its place in the Iliad. It is not an independent lay, or what the Germans call an Einzellied, arbitrarily added.7

  Based on the pioneering work of Milman Parry, recent scholarship has also shown that the Iliad is the product of oral tradition. In the earliest stages of development of the poem there was a great deal of multiformity in the Greek oral epic tradition. Countless variations on the story of the Trojan war, and episodes within it, are known to have been current in different times and different places.8 One of the traditional attacks on Iliad 10 is that it is Odyssean, i.e. it shows themes that are more typical of the Odyssey than the Iliad.9 Iliad is also the only surviving example of an extended narrative about a night raid in Homeric poetry. This has led to the charge that the Doloneia was a later addition to the poetic tradition. Shewan argues, in contrast, that Book 10 was no more Odyssean than any other book and that we should understand that the poet was drawing on a variety of traditions, some older than others. Any affinity between the two epics can be explained by the fact that Odysseus appears as a character in both poems.10 Material or themes that seems ‘different’ are not necessarily late or inferior. We should be careful of making these kinds of judgements based on what little epic literature has survived.11 There were other traditions that dealt with the theme of ambush and nighttime action from which the poet of the Iliad could have drawn. A theme that is merely uncommon in the surviving epics might not seem so unusual if more of this other literature had survived.12 As it turns out, there was indeed a traditional theme of the night raid, with its own traditional language, subthemes, conventions and poetics, and this was a part of the same system of oral poetry to which the Iliad belongs. In fact, the theme of lochos (ambush) with its traditional structure and diction long predates our received text of the Iliad.13

  This Morally Sordid Business

  Part of the shunning of this text has to do with a strategy employed by Classical scholars who feel they have to ignore it so as not to incur the charge of making arguments about Homer based on an ‘interpolated’, problematic text.14 There is another reason, however, why the text is disliked. The very theme of ambush is anathema to some, because of what some have labelled the vile, underhanded tactics described in the Doloneia. Such tactics seemed to some readers completely out of line with their own conception of what the noble Greeks should be doing: i.e. fighting in the daylight as heroes as in the rest of the poem.15 The events of Iliad 10 read like a morally sordid business, one hardly suited to the character of the gallant Diomedes. As we have seen in chapter 1, however, ambush is an integral part of Homeric warfare and is often done by its greatest heroes. Whereas combat in the Iliad takes place after the sun rises, an ambush like the one in the Doloneia takes place in the dark.16 And while men such as Achilles are the heroes of the daytime action in the Iliad, Odysseus shows up his stealthy skills at night. He has been called by one scholar ‘the protagonist par excellence of the shadows’.17 It is in ambush that he shows himself most valuable in Book 10. While this distinction may seem to set the book apart from the rest of the poem, a recent book by Casey Due and Mary Ebbott shows that nocturnal attacks and ambush are part of a different genre, a parallel tradition, with its own traditional language, themes, conventions and poetics, but nonetheless part of the same poetry to which the entire Iliad belongs.18

  The Night Operation

  Book 10 begins on the plain before Troy, where for nine years the Greeks have been unsuccessfully besieging the city. Hector and the Trojans have driven the Greeks back to their ships. It is night and Agamemnon is despondent. He sees the countless fires of the Trojan bivouac. He cannot sleep. He must think of a plan to defend his people from destruction. The Trojans have not returned to the city and may be planning to rush the camp in a night attack.19 Agamemnon gets up, puts on his tunic and boots, throws a lion skin over his shoulders, grabs his spear and goes down to his ship. There he meets his brother Menelaus, who also cannot sleep. Menelaus asks: Are you thinking of sending out a spy? ‘Not a man in sight will take that mission on, I fear, and go against our enemies, scout them out alone … it will take a daring man to do the job.’20

  Agamemnon then enlists the help of Old Nestor:

  … sleeping is just as hard for you, it seems –

  Come, let’s go down to the sentry-line and see

  if numb with exhaustion, lack of sleep, they’ve nodded off,

  all duty wiped from their minds, the watch dissolved.

  Our blood enemies camp hard by. How do we know

  they’re not about to attack us in the night?21

  Agamemnon is correct to be disturbed. He is outnumbered and waiting to be attacked; he has no spies in the field, and his advisors are quite possibly asleep. Nestor and Agamemnon go out to meet other chiefs who have been summoned. Odysseus joins them. They find the men on the watch awake while they listened for the enemy coming. When everyone is assembled, Nestor addresses them about what a good spy might hope to find out:

  My friends, isn’t there one man among us here,

  so sure of himself, his soldiers’ nerve and pluck,

  he’d infiltrate these overreaching Trojans?

  Perhaps he’d seize a straggler among the foe

  or catch some rumour floating along their lines.

  What plans are they mapping, what manoeuvres next?

  Are they bent on holding tight by the ships, exposed?

  o
r heading home to Troy, now they’ve trounced our armies?

  If a man could gather that, then make it back unharmed,

  why, what glory he’d gain across the whole wide earth

  in the eyes of every man – and what gifts he’d win!22

  This is an excellent assessment of what an intelligence operation might require. Courage, speed and power are as necessary here as on the battlefield. Nestor says there is kleos (glory) for undertaking a spying mission, making it parallel to fighting in battle. But success in this covert operation will also require special qualities of mind; wit (noos), craft (metis)23 and an extraordinary sense of timing.24 Spies must have an excellent sense of planning – the ability to lie in wait and spring an ambush. Like other ambushes in Homer, the Doloneia takes place on the third watch of night when the stars have turned their course.25 The decision is that someone must venture across the plain and make certain, if he can, whether there is a night attack imminent. Diomedes immediately volunteers:

  Nestor, the mission stirs my fighting blood.

  I’ll slip right into enemy lines at once –

  these Trojans, camped at our flank.

  If another comrade would escort me, though,

  there’d be more comfort in it, confidence too.

  When two work side-by-side, one or the other

  spots the opening first if a kill’s at hand.

  When one looks out for himself, alert but alone,

  his reach is shorter – his sly moves miss the mark.26

  Many men are willing to accompany Diomedes but he chooses Odysseus as his partner for the qualities that make him a good ambusher, especially his ability to come back alive.27 Brawn and brains make a perfect team: ‘How could I overlook god-like Odysseus … With him accompanying me even from burning fire we could return home (nostos), since he is an expert at devising (noos).’28