LISTS

‘But how to get there, Mr Sharpe? Lists.

And how to be noted ye were there? Lists.

And what do they send home but lists of

dead, dying, sick, honoured and gazetted, Captain?’

(Sharpe’s Company)

 I’m sure that the Gentlemen of the club will excuse the blatant use of mixed metaphor but, in my defence, whilst I have been reading the Iliad, I have also been painting for Sharpe Practice 2. The point is though, I feel that it is time to look at some Bronze Age army lists; and as Uriah has so rightly pointed out we all like a good army list. At this stage, I’m not going to attempt a full blown army composition but simply want to get an idea of the different troop types involved. Ultimately, this will influence any future figure purchases, so I want to at least give it a bit of thought.

It will probably come as no surprise that I’m going to start with the Iliad. Unfortunately, this brings us face to face with the ‘Homeric Question’. This is actually a whole series of questions going back as far as classical antiquity and still debated today. Most of the pertinent themes can be encompassed by ‘who was Homer and when did he write?’ For our purposes this can be expressed as, ‘how much of the Iliad truly reflects the Bronze Age?’ It would be naïve to expect that the Iliad has survived intact and unaltered from the Bronze Age but the million dollar question is ‘how much of the poem is actually from a later date?’ Certainly scholars have spotted anachronisms in the poem, in its current form, but does that mean we should dismiss the whole work? Strauss has argued, in his ‘The Trojan War. A New History’, that ‘…overly sceptical scholars have thrown out the baby with the bathwater’, and I tend to agree. Or perhaps, in a completely cavalier fashion, I just want it to be true; it’s such a good story after all! Either way, for this exercise, I’m going to assume that there is a large kernel of truth to the story. In any case, as this is a war gaming project, does it really matter; think of it as a Bronze Age ImagiNations project and we’re sorted.

My first port of call (no pun intended – honest) was the so-called catalogue of ships. This appears in Book 2 and is an astonishing section of the Iliad, in which Homer lists the contingents of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy. The list is so long and detailed (more than 250 lines long) that some have proposed an origin in something akin to the Linear B tablets, so beloved of Mycenaean bureaucracy. The list details which towns and cities sent troops, the number of ships and the names of their leaders. This tells us that the Achaean army consisted of 29 contingents, from 190 locations, under 46 captains commanding 1186 ships. This is a huge number of ships and I’m not sure I believe this; however, one of the really interesting things about this list is that it apparently contains many places that no longer existed at the time the poem was written. Hence, this could well be a snapshot of the geopolitical situation in Late Bronze Age Greece.

ACHAEAN AND TROJAN ALLIES FROM THE ILIAD
By Pinpin - Inspiré de la carte "ACHAEANS and TROJANS" du site de Carlos Parada, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2830268

For the geographers out there (yes I’m looking at you Uriah), there is even an interesting academic research project that digitally maps the catalogue of ships; which is nice!

http://ships.lib.virginia.edu/

The Iliad also contains a corresponding list of Trojan allies but for now I’m going to focus on the Achaeans.

Looking at this list, my first thought was ‘here is a ready-made army list’. However, in retrospect, it doesn’t really help as it only tells us the names of the different contingents. We do learn something about the relative size of the contingents and the capacity of the ships but nothing about how the different contingents were equipped. The sole exception is the contingent led by Philoctetes, which consisted of 7 ships, each with 50 oarsmen who were also archers.

So it’s back to the main body of the text for further details. From this we can see that the leaders and heroes usually come equipped with chariots. As for the masses, they fight on foot and seem to be predominately equipped with spear and shield. Thrown weapons feature very heavily and warriors often appear to carry two spears. Swords are mentioned fairly frequently but nowhere near as often as spears and they are definitely seen as secondary weapons. There are also a couple of rare instances of axes. Bronze abounds in heaps throughout the poem; spearheads, arrow heads, swords, helmets, corselets and shield facings are all bronze. The leading fighters of both sides appear to be armoured but there may also be a hint of lesser equipped troops, although I’m not too sure on the latter. Missile troops appear on both sides and seem to be unarmoured. The Locrian contingent, led by the Lesser Ajax, was unarmoured, lacking helmets and fought with bow and sling.

So now we have a description of our Bronze Age troop types, according to the Iliad, how does this compare to depictions in popular rule systems?

For this I’m going to take a leaf from Uriah’s book and start with the industry standard, i.e. DBA (I also had a quick peak at DBM and FoG but I suspect they all hark back to some original WRG list anyway).

Achaean: General (LCh // 4Bd), 3 Heroic charioteers (LCh // 4Bd), 4 Spearmen (Sp), 2 Spearmen (Sp) or Pylians (4Pk), 1 Myrmidons (4Wb) or javelinmen (Ps), 1 javelinmen, archers or slingers (Ps)

Trojan: General (LCh // 4Bd), 3 Heroic charioteers (LCh // 4Bd), 4 Spearmen (Sp), 1 Spearmen (Sp) or Lukka (3Bd), 1 archers (3Bw or Ps), 2 javelinmen, archers or slingers (Ps)

Both the Achaean and Trojan lists are very similar; which is fine as there is little to distinguish the two sides in the Iliad. Both seem to consist of chariots, spearmen, light infantry and one or two ‘special’ units. The chariots comprise a quarter of the army which seems a tad high and something that I will probably explore at a later date. On the plus side the charioteers can dismount as an element of ‘blades’; in DBA terms these are solid close fighting infantry primarily skilled in fighting with swords, better armoured than other foot and often adding supplementary missile weapons. Half the Achaean army (slightly less for the Trojans) consists of spearmen; representing solid close formation infantry fighting with spears in a rigid shield wall. A quarter of the Trojan army (slightly less for the Achaeans) comprise light infantry (psiloi); javelin men, archers or slingers. The Trojans may field one of these as bows; ‘fast’ foot formed in bodies and shooting at longer range than psiloi.

This only leaves the ‘special’ units. For the Trojans a unit of spearmen may be replaced by Lukka, fielded as ‘fast’ Blades. By contrast the Achaeans may swap a couple of units of spearmen for Pylian pikemen and a unit of javelin men for Myrmidons, fielded as solid warband. Apparently the latter represent wild irregular foot relying on a ferocious impetuous charge but keeping a shield wall in adversity.

So now we have two portrayals of the armies of the Trojan wars, the next step will be to look at the archaeology and see how that fits in with the above descriptions. However, that is for another day.