Subject: e-qe-ta 'follower' as heavy infantryman
Culture: Achaean/late Mycenaean
Setting: Late Helladic, Aegean late 2nd millennium BC
Event Photos
* Kennedy 2025 chapter 8
"The Iliad present the Trojan War as a single, continuous, ten-year campaign, with a massive Achaean army encamped on the shores of the Troad for a decade. From a logistical and historical standpoint, this is the epic's greatest embellishment. No Bronze Age state possessed the logistical capacity to sustain such a large force, so far from home, for such a length of time. Supply lines were tenuous, dependent on foraging and sea transport that was itself subject to weather and piracy. A permanent encampment of tens of thousands of men would have stripped the surrounding landscape bare of resources within months.
"The reality of Bronze Age warfare was far more episodic. The dominant form of conflict was not the protracted war of annihilation, but the strategic raid or punitive expedition. Kings would launch seasonal campaigns -- razzias -- with specific, limited objectives: to punish a rebellious vassal, to secure access to vital trade routes, or, most commonly, to acquire plunder. Hittite and Egyptian texts are filled with accounts of such campaigns. A king would march into enemy territory, burn a few towns, seize livestock, crops, and precious metals, and, most importantly, carry off captives. These captives were a crucial economic resource, providing the labor that powered the palatial economies. The tablets from Pylos list groups of female captives (ra-wi-ja-ja) and their children, put to work in the textile industry. War was, above all, a profitable enterprise."
Primary Sources
* Kennedy 2025 chapter 12
"The graves of Mycenae are a testament to a society that defined its elite through warfare. To be a king was to be a warrior. To die was to be entombed as a hero, your martial identity projected into the afterlife through your weapons, your golden mask, and the scenes of combat that adorned your possessions. This is the ethos of Achilles: a life is measured by its martial deeds, and death is not an end if your glory can be preserved for posterity. The gold of Mycenae and the poetry of Homer are two different media expressing the same fundamental cultural value.
"This celebration of the martial ideal was not confined to the tombs of the great. It was a pervasive theme in Mycenaean art. Frescoes from the walls of the palaces of Pylos, Mycenae, and Tiryns depict warriors in procession, on their chariots, and in stylized combat. One of the most famous pieces of Late Mycenaean pottery, the 'Warrior Vase' found at Mycenae, shows a line of grim, identically armed soldiers marching off to war. They carry long spears and small, round shields, and wear horned helmets and greaves. On the other side of the vase, a woman waves them goodbye, her hand raised to her head in a gesture of mourning. The image is poignant and powerful, it captures both the organized, professional nature of Mycenaean warfare and its immense human cost -- a theme that resonates deeply with the tragic core of the Iliad.
"Sealstones, small, intricately carved gems used for signing and sealing documents, also teem with images of combat. Muscular, wasp-waisted heroes, often in the iconic figure-eight shield, battle lions or other warriors in a visual language that is unmistakably heroic. This was a culture saturated with the imagery of struggle and victory. The Mycenaean boy growing up in a palatial center would have been surrounded by these depictions, internalizing the idea that the highest calling for a man of noble birth was to fight. The archetype of the peerless warrior was not invented by Homer; he inherited it from a visual and material culture that had been celebrating it for five hundred years."
* Snodgrass 1999 p33
"We can best sum up the developments in warfare in these years by returning once again to the Warrior Vase found in Mycenae and dating to its last days. The figures on the vase are plain and unheroic; their armament is far from magnificence. But they are organized forces, in uniform equipment. The men on the reverse side have their spears raised, on the point of joining battle, but they are in step and move in unison. There could be no clearer portrayal of the change from the excessive individual splendour of the Shaft-grave princes to a standardized army. It is in some such array that we should imagine the Mycenaeans taking the field in the various wars of which we hear, in contemporary documents or in tradition, in the latter part of the thirteenth century."
Secondary Sources
* Cleator 1967 p67
"From Homeric descriptions and other sources of information, we learn that the protagonists of the Greek Bronze Age made extensive use of two-wheeled chariots as an aid to mobility, though much of their fighting on the actual field of battle, apart from some spear throwing, was done on foot by dismounted warriors wearing helmet, cuirass, and greaves, and equipped with a short sword and round shield. Their undoubted proficiency and valour, however, proved of no avail against the iron-possessing Dorians, and the destruction (c. 1100 B.C.) of Mycenae and its associated civilisation by these untutored kinsmen resulted in a period of backwardness which persisted for the next three and a half centuries or so."
Field Notes
