Read The Last Full Measure for Free Online

Enops
    cowering, crouched in his fine polished chariot
,
    crazed with fear, and the reins flew from his grip—
    Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone
,
    ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
    he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail
,
    hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
    on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea
,
    some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook
.
    So with the spear Patroclus gaffed him off his car
,
    his mouth gaping around the glittering point
    and flipped him down facefirst
,
    dead as he fell, his life breath blown away
. 40
    The manner of Thestor’s death, or rather the manner in which it is depicted, is ignominious. He is reduced to a fish, as befits a coward. But even the bravest and most noble, like Hector, may be debased in death. Achilles, his killer, “bent on outrage, onshaming noble Hector” for having killed Achilles’ soul-brother, Patroclus:
    Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet
,
    he knotted straps of rawhide through them both
,
    lashed them to his chariot, left the head to drag
    and mounting the car, hoisting the famous arms aboard
,
    he whipped his team to a run and breakneck on they flew
,
    holding nothing back. And a thick cloud of dust rose up
    from the man they dragged, his dark hair swirling round
    that head so handsome once
. 41
    The combat of
The Iliad
, focused on heroic champions, would certainly have been very different in reality. Death would have come in what Homer describes as “the buck-and-rush” of battle, or as the historian J. E. Lendon depicts it:
    Amidst the showers of spears and arrows and stones, amidst the running to and fro and confusion and stabbing by surprise, men of high standing would go down, killed anonymously by stray missiles and the spears of low wretches; trampled by horses, or crushed ingloriously by stray chariots. In the confusion the high deeds of the brave would go unnoticed, along with the cringing of the cowardly. The would-be heroes would emerge from battle with the same demoralizing certainty as survivors of a trench bombardment that this kind of combat was chiefly a matter of luck, not a test of excellence; that the strong and weak, the brave and craven can live or die quite at random; that bravery is not necessarily rewarded with glory or cowardice punished with shame. In the real world, Homeric combat would turn the bright colors of epic to gray. 42
    Euripides, looking back on the Homeric tradition, was also a little skeptical about the apparent clarity of heroic dueling. How did the gladiators find one another? “One thing I will not ask or I’d be laughed at: whom each of these men stood facing in the battle … When a man stands face to face with the enemy, he is barely able to see what he needs to see.” 43
    The Iliad
is part of an essential process to burnish combat killing and present it in a heroic form. We have had to be taught how to love war because seen unadorned it is too despicable to bear. Death in the Homeric era would have come not so much from heroic single-combat confrontations, as promoted in
The Iliad
, but more probably from a type of warfare rooted in prehistoric tribal combat. Peltasts—the hurlers of javelins and stones—would rush from the throng to deliver their missiles, and perhaps get in the occasional javelin thrust on an exposed and isolated enemy, before withdrawing into the safety of the pack. These low-risk opportunists were much more typical of archaic Greek warfare, though certainly not as heroic as duelist or phalangite and therefore not worthy of Homeric attention.
The Iliad
wants us to see the lions rather than the jackals.
    In 1879 a German surgeon, H. Frölich, analyzed the wounds suffered by warriors in
The Iliad
and sorted them by weapon type, anatomical location, and relative lethality. 44 Of course, Frölich was analyzing an epic poem in which artistic license plays a role, but nevertheless