Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are considered the first great works of Western literature, and occupy the top slots in many guides to cultural literacy. Though these narratives are set at the time of the Trojan War around 1200 BCE, they were written down much later, between 800 and 650 BCE, and are thought to reflect life among the tribes and chiefdoms of the eastern Mediterranean in that era.
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Today one often reads that total war, which targets an entire society rather than just its armed forces, is a modern invention. Total war has been blamed on the emergence of nation-states, on universalist ideologies, and on technologies that allow killing at a distance. But if Homer's depictions are accurate (and they do jibe with archaeology, ethnography, and history), then the wars in archaic Greece were as total as anything in the modern age. Agamemnon explains to King Menelaus his plans for war:
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Our understanding of prehistoric violence depends on the happenstance of which bodies were accidentally embalmed or fossilized, and so it must be radically incomplete. But once written language began to spread, ancient people left us with better information about how they conducted their affairs.
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We also commonly read that 20th-century wars were unprecedentedly destructive because they were fought with machine guns, artillery, bombers, and other long-distance weaponry, freeing soldiers from natural inhibitions against face-to-face combat and allowing them to kill large numbers of faceless enemies without mercy. According to this reasoning, handheld weapons are not nearly as lethal as our high-tech methods of battle. But Homer vividly described the large-scale damage that warriors of his day could inflict. Gottschall offers a sample of his imagery:
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In his book The Rape of Troy, the literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall discusses how archaic Greek wars were carried out:
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Fast ships with shallow drafts are rowed onto beaches and seaside communities are sacked before neighbors can lend defensive support. The men are usually killed, livestock and other portable wealth are plundered, and women are carried off to live among the victors and perform sexual and menial labors. Homeric men live with the possibility of sudden, violent death, and the women live in fear for their men and children, and of sails on the horizon that may harbinger new lives of rape and slavery.
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Menelaus, my soft-hearted brother, why are you so concerned for these men? Did the Trojans treat you as handsomely when they stayed in your palace? No: we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers' wombs -- not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.
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Breached with surprising ease by the cold bronze, the body's contents pour forth in viscous torrents: portions of brains emerge at the ends of quivering spears, young men hold back their viscera with desperate hands, eyes are knocked or cut from skulls and glimmer sightlessly in the dust. Sharp points forge new entrances and exits in young bodies: in the center of foreheads, in temples, between the eyes, at the base of the neck, clean through the mouth or cheek and out the other side, through flanks, crotches, buttocks, hands, navels, backs, stomachs, nipples, chests, noses, ears, and chins… Spears, pikes, arrows, swords, daggers, and rocks lust for the savor of flesh and blood. Blood sprays forth and mists the air. Bone fragments fly. Marrow boils from fresh stumps…
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In the aftermath of battle, blood flows from a thousand mortal or maiming wounds, turns dust to mud, and fattens the grasses of the plain. Men plowed into the soil by heavy chariots, sharp-hoofed stallions, and the sandals of men are past recognition. Armor and weaponry litter the field. Bodies are everywhere, decomposing, deliquescing, feasting dogs, worms, flies, and birds.
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The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: "I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women." When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too.
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These tales of massacre and rape are disturbing even by the standards of modern war documentaries. Homer and his characters, to be sure, deplored the waste of war, but they accepted it as an inescapable fact of life, like the weather -- something that everyone talked about but no one could do anything about. As Odysseus put it, "[We are men] to whom Zeus has given the fate of winding down our lives in painful wars, from youth until we perish, each of us." The men's ingenuity, applied so resourcefully to weapons and strategy, turned up empty-handed when it came to the earthly causes of war. Rather than framing the scourge of warfare as a human problem for humans to solve, they concocted a fantasy of hotheaded gods and attributed their own tragedies to the gods' jealousies and follies.
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