It may be necessary, at the opening of Homer's battles, to give some explanatory observations on them. When we reflect that no less than the compass of twelve books is taken up in these, we shall have reason to wonder by what method the author could prevent descriptions of such a length from being tedious. It is not enough to say, that though the subject itself be the same, the actions are always different; that we have now distinct combats, now promiscuous fights, now single duels, now general engagements; or that the scenes are perpetually varied; we are now in the fields, now at the fortification of the Greeks, now at the ships, now at the gates of Troy, now at the river Scamander: but we must look farther into the art of the poet to find the reasons of this astonishing variety.
We first observe that diversity in the deaths of his warriors, which he has supplied by the vastest fertility of invention. These he distinguishes several ways: sometimes by the Characters of the men, their age, office, professions, nation, family, etc. One is a blooming Youth, whose father dissuaded him from the war; one is a Priest, whose piety could not save him: one is a Sportsman, whom Diana taught in vain; one is the native of a far distant country, who is never to return; one is descended from a Noble Line, which ends in his death; one is made remarkable by his Boasting; another by his Beseeching; and another, who is distinguished no way else, is marked by his Habit, and the singularity of his armor.
Sometimes he varies these by the several Postures in which his heroes are represented either fighting or falling. Some of these are so exceedingly exact, that one may guess, from the very position of the combatant, whereabouts the wound will light: others so very peculiar and uncommon, that they could only be the effect of an imagination which had searched through all the ideas of nature. Such is that picture of Mydon in the fifth book, whose arm being numbed by a blow on the elbow, drops the reins, that trail on the ground; and then being suddenly struck on the temples, falls headlong from the chariot, in a soft and deep place, where he sinks up to the shoulders in the sands, and continues a while fixed by the weight of his armour, with his legs quivering in the air, till he is trampled down by his horses.
Another cause of this variety is the difference of the Wounds that are given in the Iliad: they are by no means like the wounds described by most other poets, which are commonly made in the self-same obvious places; the heart and the head serve for all those in general who understand no anatomy, and sometimes, for variety, they kill men by wounds that are nowhere mortal but in their poems. As the whole human body is the subject of these, so nothing is more necessary to him who would describe them well, than a thorough knowledge of its structure, even though the poet is not professedly to write of them as an anatomist; in the same manner, as an exact skill in anatomy is necessary to those painters that would excel in drawing the naked body, though they are not to make every muscle as visible as in a book of chirurgery. It appears from so many passages in Homer, that he was perfectly master of this science, that it would be needless to cite any in particular.
It may be necessary to take notice of some customs of antiquity relating to the Arms and Art Military of those times, which are proper to be known, in order to form a right notion of our author's descriptions of war.
That Homer copied the manners and customs of the age he wrote of, rather than of that he lived in, has been observed in some instances. As that he nowhere represents Cavalry or Trumpets to have been used in the Trojan wars, though they apparently were in his own time. It is not therefore impossible but there may be found in his works some deficiencies in the art of war, which are not to be imputed to his ignorance, but to his judgment.
Horses had not been brought into Greece long before the siege of Troy. They were originally eastern animals, and if we find at that very period so great a number of them reckoned up in the wars of the IsrÆlites, it is the less a wonder, considering they came from Asia. The practice of riding them was so little known in Greece a few years before, that they looked upon the Centaurs who first used it, as monsters compounded of men and horses. Nestor, in the first Iliad, says he had seen these Centaurs in his youth, and Polypoetes in the second is said to have been born on the day that his father expelled them from Pelion to the deserts of Æthica. They had no other use of horses than to draw their chariots in battle, so that whenever Homer speaks of fighting from a horse, taming a horse, or the like, it is constantly to be understood of fighting from a chariot, or taming horses to that service. This was a piece of decorum in the poet; for in his own time they were arrived to such a perfection in horsemanship, that in the fifteenth Iliad, ver. 822, we have a simile taken from an extraordinary feat of activity, where one man manages four horses at once, and leaps from the back of one to the other at full speed.
If we consider in what high esteem among warriors these noble animals must have been at their first coming into Greece, we shall the less wonder at the frequent occasions Homer has taken to describe and celebrate them. It is not so strange to find them set almost upon a level with men, at the time when a horse in the prizes was of equal value with a captive.
The Chariots were in all probability very low. For we frequently find in the Iliad that a person who stands erect on a chariot is killed (and sometimes by a stroke on the head), by a foot soldier with a sword. This may farther appear from the ease and readiness with which they alight or mount on every occasion, to facilitate which, the chariots were made open behind. That the wheels were but small, may be guessed from a custom they had of taking them off and setting them on, as they were laid by, or made use of. Hebe in the fifth book puts on the wheels of Juno's chariot when she calls for it in haste: and it seems to be with allusion to the same practice that it is said in Exodus, ch. xiv., The Lord took off their chariot-wheels, so that they drove them heavily. The sides were also low; for whoever is killed in his chariot throughout the poem, constantly falls to the ground, as having nothing to support him. That the whole machine was very small and light, is evident from a passage in the tenth Iliad, where Diomed debates whether he shall draw the chariot of Rhesus out of the way, or carry in on his shoulders to a place of safety. All the particulars agree with the representations of the chariots on the most ancient Greek coins; where the tops of them reached not so high as the backs of the horses; the wheels are yet lower, and the heroes who stand in them are seen from the knee upwards.
There were generally two persons in each chariot, one of whom was wholly employed in guiding the horses. They used, indifferently, two, three, or four horses: from whence it happens, that sometimes when a horse is killed, the hero continues the fight with the two or more that remain; and at other times a warrior retreats upon the loss of one; not that he had less courage than the other, but that he had fewer horses.
Their Swords were all broad cutting swords, for we find they never stab, but with their spears. The Spears were used in two ways, either to push with, or to cast from them, like the missive javelins. It seems surprising, that a man should throw a dart or spear with such force, as to pierce through both sides of the armour and the body (as is often described in Homer): for if the strength of the men was gigantic, the armour must have been strong in proportion. Some solution might be given for this, if we imagined the armour was generally brass, and the weapons pointed with iron; and if we could fancy that Homer called the spears and swords brazen, in the same manner that he calls the reins of a bridle ivory, only from the ornaments about them. But there are passages where the point of the spear is expressly said to be of brass, as in the description of that of Hector in Iliad vi. Pausanias (Laconicis) takes it for granted, that the arms, as well offensive as defensive, were brass. He says the spear of Achilles was kept in his time in the temple of Minerva, the top and point of which were brass; and the sword of Meriones, in that of Æsculapius, among the Nicomedians, was entirely of the same metal. But be it as it will, there are examples even at this day of such a prodigious force in casting darts, as almost exceeds credibility. The Turks and Arabs will pierce through thick planks with darts of hardened wood; which can only be attributed to their being bred (as the ancients were) to that exercise, and to the strength and agility acquired by a constant practice of it.
We may ascribe to the same cause their power of casting stones of a vast weight, which appears a common practice in these battles. It is an error to imagine this to be only a fictitious embellishment of the poet, which was one of the exercises of war among the ancient Greeks and Orientals. St. Jerome tells us, it was an old custom in Palestine, and in use in his own time, to have round stones of great weight kept in the castles and villages, for the youths to try their strength with.