Free The Trojan War by Barry Strauss

found fruits on the trees, grain on the threshing floors, and vats overflowing with wine. They got as drunk as at a party at home in Egypt.
    Whether sobriety reigned or not, the day finally came to leave Aulis. At dawn, a favorable wind was blowing. The pitch-black hulls had been eyed and pawed and checked by hand for any holes. The gear was stowed, the horses brought on board, the fodder was found, and the men were ready. All that remained was for the chiefs to sacrifice to the gods. They set up an altar at a spring under a plane tree and led the bulls to the slaughter.
    Then, when everything was done, an ill omen appeared—this one, reported in Homer. A snake crawled up the altar and onto the tree, where it found a sparrow and her eight chicks in a nest on a branch, and killed them. Then the snake turned to stone. A rational explanation of the phenomenon might be that the beast died on the spot. In any case, only Zeus could have done it: everyone knew it, and they were terrified.
    It took the seer Calchas, son of Thestor, to break the spell. Imagine him wearing a long robe, with a bay-leaf wreath in his hair, and carrying a staff tied with the ribbons of the god Apollo, whom he served. He carried himself with the dignity of someone close to the gods and with the caution of the man who had given King Agamemnon the bad news that his child would have to be sacrificed.
    Divination—predicting the future on the basis of natural phenomena—was common in the Bronze Age. Birds were important omens, especially in Anatolia, and so were snakes. The portent at Aulis meant, Calchas explained, that a long, hard war lay ahead. For nine years they would struggle but in the tenth, absolute victory would be their reward. The chiefs chose to accentuate the positive: final victory.
    And so, at last, the chiefs boarded their vessels, and the fleet was off. The size of the expedition was extraordinary, but the act of setting sail was common. Homer describes such a scene well:
    Then launch, and hoist the mast: indulgent gales,
    Supplied by Phoebus, fill the swelling sails;
    The milk-white canvas bellying as they blow,
    The parted ocean foams and roars below:
    Above the bounding billows swift they flew….
    When the wind fell the men would row. They sat on benches in the long ships along two open, well-ventilated galleries, with leather screens to protect their heads, which stuck out over an open bulwark. They averaged twenty-five men on a side, and each of them pulled an oar. The men’s grain was stored in leather bags; their water and wine were in clay jars or skin bottles. Their gear was under the benches. If challenged, the men would have to grab a shield, spear, and sword and take on the enemy’s boarding party, but they would not be challenged: they had the greatest navy in the world.
    After leaving Aulis, the sleek hulls would have passed through the channel between the Greek coast and the island of Euboea and then turned eastward, island-hopping from the Sporades to Lemnos to Imbros. From there, it took only twenty miles on the bright sea for the black ships to reach Troy.
    The Greeks would have a great deal to worry about when they got there: finding the right landing ground; protecting themselves from the slings and spears and arrows of the Trojan army that would surely be there to await them; securing local sources of food, fodder, and water; and winning some easy loot in order to keep the men happy. But there was one thing the Greeks would not have to worry about—the Trojan navy. Amazingly, despite its location by the sea and its economic dependence on maritime trade, Troy had no navy, or at least no significant one.
    This was more than a passing weakness; it was a major vulnerability for the Trojans. Because they had command of the sea, the Greeks were able to raid the enemy coast at will. If it had similarly possessed competitive naval power, Troy could have brought the war to the enemy with an offensive