“There is one omen, and one only — that a man should fight for his country.”Homer · Iliada · -750 · Homer, «Iliada», XII, 243, Hector către Polidamas, în traducerea în proză a lui Samuel Butler (1898); versiunea românească e o redare a textului lui Butler
In the Iliad the chariot is a taxi, armour is capital, and the duel is the unit of power.
The Iliad's weapons are bronze: a long ash spear with a bronze point, a short sword, helmet, breastplate and a great round shield or one "like a tower", as Ajax's is. Archaeology confirms it: the Dendra panoply (fifteenth century BC) is a complete bronze armour, and the boar's-tusk helmet Homer describes has been found in Mycenaean graves. The chariot, the decisive weapon of the Near East, appears in Homer mostly as a vehicle: the hero is driven to the front line, steps down and fights on foot. Either the poet no longer knew how chariot warfare worked, or the Achaeans really used them that way on broken ground. Fighting is organised around the promachoi, "those in front": champions who step out of the ranks, challenge one another, throw the spear, fight hand to hand, then strip the loser of his armour — the trophy that is also proof of the deed. The mass of soldiers appears as background; honour (timē) and glory (kleos) are the real currency, and captured armour the capital. Siege proper, with engines and ramps, is absent: Troy falls by cunning, not by siege craft. Today's parallel: wars of prestige — expensive, few, highly visible weapons — still coexist with wars of mass and attrition. The Iliad is the chronicle of an army that measures its strength in champions; the twentieth century and today's drones inverted the proportion, but the dispute between spectacular quality and cheap quantity is the same.
Money and honor are paid in the same currency: bronze armor. When a champion falls, his team fights for his body, and his enemies fight for his gear. That is why the battles around a corpse are so fierce — it is not just a corpse, it is a trophy that can be worn onward. Think of a football match: the shirt worn by a famous player becomes itself a valuable object. In the Iliad, Achilles' armor worn by Patroclus becomes a war-cause in its own right. Which raises a question: what happens when the armor ends up on someone unable to wear it?
The Iliad shows no siege. There are no battering rams, ramps, or siege engines. The city falls, in the end, through a horse full of soldiers — that is, through trickery, not through engineering. For ten years, battle comes down to something much simpler: a few champions step out of the ranks, call each other by name, hurl their spears, and fight hand to hand, while the rest of the army watches from nearby. The chariot is just a taxi: it drops you at the line, you get off, you fight on foot. It is like a neighborhood feud decided by a fight between two bosses, with an audience around. A man is worth what he has done, not how many he commands. Which raises another question: what happens to a whole army when its champion refuses to leave his tent?
Why it matters Whoever sees that Homer's army measures its strength in champions understands why an army today argues between expensive weapons and cheap drones.