39 pages • 1 hour read
The Trojan War: A New History
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Black Ships Sail”
Hundreds of wooden ships, coated in black pitch, assemble in Aulis’s harbor. Agamemnon is demonstrably the greatest king in Greece. The warlords he assembles in Homer may be fictional but they do accurately represent the Bronze Age approach to war. These expert Spartan sea raiders seek to plunder the wealth of Troy, taking bride and prestige back with them as booty.
An adverse Boreas wind prevents the fleet from sailing and begins to cast a dark cloud over the expedition. To appease the angry goddess Artemis, Agamemnon is said to have consented to the sacrifice of his own daughter, Iphigenia. In some versions of the myth, Artemis saves the girl, substituting a deer in her place. The adverse wind stopped blowing shortly afterward.
The Greeks’ sea power predominates in Homer’s stories. The Mycenaean oared galleys are light and maneuverable. Thucydides (460-397 BCE) calculates that they could carry 102,000 men, while Homer enumerates a modest 50,000. Meanwhile, the Trojans had no navy, specializing instead in cavalry.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Agamemnon may have been six-feet-tall, judging by the skeletons discovered in the royal Mycenean tombs. The average Greek man at the time stood five-foot-five-inches tall, making Agamemnon a giant. His kingdom probably stretched between the northeastern Peloponnese and the island of Rhodes.
Strong personal ties bound the groups of soldiers. The Boreas wind that hindered Greek progress, said to have been the wrath of the goddess Artemis, is actually common in the summer, and sailing the area is complicated by strong riptides. Regarding the sacrifice of Iphigenia, there is evidence of human sacrifice in Bronze Age Crete. Divination was also important to Bronze Age life, and especially when it came to legitimizing warfare.
The numbers of soldiers calculated by Homer and Thucydides are unlikely given that under 2,000 men are estimated to have been of military age in Troy at the time, though this does not account for Troy’s numerous allies. Modern historians conservatively approximate around 15,000 men per side. This would have necessitated around 300 ships. The Spartans sailed roughly twenty miles to Troy. Archeological evidence reveals that the Myceneans traded in Troy, so there might also have been allies within the city walls.
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