Free The Trojan War by Barry Strauss Page A

across the Aegean Sea into the Greek heartland. Without a fleet, however, the Trojans were continually stuck on the strategic defensive. Agamemnon might have felt like the Hittite King Hattushilish III, who said that he could “cast a glance” at the enemy’s country but the enemy could not cast a glance back at him.
    Here is a paradox: Troy was a seaport that did not fight at sea. Founded by continentals looking outward to the sea, it became rich by offering sailors a foothold in the wind, but without developing its own navy. The Trojans fit the description of Bronze Age peoples of whom Thucydides says “although they inhabited the lowlands they were not sea-goers”—at least not when it came to fighting at sea. The Trojans no doubt had boats but not of the quality of the Greek warships nor in large enough number to compete.
    For example, when Paris went to Sparta to bring back Helen, he had ships specially made for the trip. The builder was Phereclus son of Tekton and grandson of Harmon. Phereclus was a superb craftsman, described by Homer as someone who “knew how to make, with his hands, many elaborate and skillfully crafted things.” Indeed, his name means Famous, son of the Builder and grandson of the Joiner. Homer says:
    Thy father’s skill, O Phereclus! was thine,
    The graceful fabric and the fair design;
    For loved by Pallas, Pallas did impart
    To him the shipwright’s and the builder’s art.
    Beneath his hand the fleet of Paris rose,
    The fatal cause of all his country’s woes….
    Phereclus built Paris “well-balanced ships” for his getaway. The implication is that the ships on hand in Troy were no match for Menelaus’s fleet.
    Troy had little incentive to build a navy. Middlemen have no need to go abroad for plunder. Warships had little appeal to men who could garner wealth, glory, and security by breeding horses.
    Archaeology as well as myth makes the Trojans latecomers to the horse. Myth considers Troy’s horses a gift from Zeus. Excavation shows that the horse was not native to Troy but arrived around 1700 B.C. , late, by Near Eastern standards, after which horse bones abound in the ruins. Trojans took to horses with the zeal of converts. Homer’s Priam has royal stables in Troy and a horse farm near the city of Abydos on the Dardanelles. Andromache feeds her husband Hector’s horses grain and wine, while Pandarus goes one better, by fighting on foot in order to spare his mounts from missing mealtime.
    These were princes who could have rubbed shoulders with any age’s bluebloods, including the horsey Hittites, Troy’s powerful ally. And like the Hittites, the Trojans couldn’t see beyond a silken mane. Landlocked in central Anatolia, the Hittites tended to imagine the coast as the edge of the world. Hittite kings boasted of extending their realm to “the border of the sea,” as if nothing lay beyond. Their treaty with Troy, for example, says nothing about ships, while it specifically mentions Troy’s obligation to send infantry and chariotry to Hatti when needed. The horse was king, or so it seemed, but danger came by sea.
    According to Homer, a generation before the Trojan War, King Laomedon of Troy promised horses to Heracles in exchange for ridding Troy of a sea monster. Heracles killed the beast but Laomedon reneged. The angry hero attacked the city and “filled the streets with widows.”
    True, Heracles had only six ships at his disposal, but Heracles’s son Tlepolemus brags that his father destroyed Troy, and evidence from Ugarit supports his boasting. In a letter from around 1200 B.C. the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, complained that an enemy did serious damage to his country with only seven ships. The crews of Heracles’ six ships would have amounted to just several hundred men, and they could not have taken a walled city like Troy, but the harbor town, farmhouses, and other unwalled