53 Homer, Odyssey 4.266–289, 8.492–520; 11.523–53.
54 See O. Andersen, ‘Odysseus and the Wooden Horse’, Symbolae Osloenses 52 (1977), 6–7. Euripides refers to the Wooden Horse as an ambush twice: Euripides, Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, trans. by David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), lines 534–5, 560–1. A rather interesting parallel to the stratagem of the Wooden Horse appears in an ambush narrated by Thucydides 4.67.1–4. See also F. Frontisi-Ducroux, Dédale: Mythologie de l’Artisan en Grèce Ancienne (Paris: Maspero, 1975), pp. 140–1.
55 Lesches, The Little Iliad, 1. trans. by H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb edition of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).
56 The Aeneid also devotes a book to its own night raid, that of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9. See Dué and Ebbott, p. 136.
57 Translation from Andersen, p. 6.
58 Flaumenhaft, p. 16 says this victory ‘raises a subordinate military manoeuvre to the means of final victory’.
59 Homer, Iliad 7.232, 242–3.
60 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 160.
61 For examples of the single shot, four of the five men in the opening scene of the first battle are hit by a spear thrown at them without warning. See the discussion in van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 161 with the following examples: those killed while dismounting Homer, Iliad 11.151–2; the archer’s use of surprise 8.266–79; 11.369–79; killed by a third party 15.539–41; 16.319–25; killed while body-snatching 4.467–9, 15.524–9; 17.288–94; stabbed in the back during flight 5.38–41; killed while in shock 13.434–44; 16:401–10, 806–21.
62 Homer, Iliad 16.745.
63 Homer, Iliad 14.456–7.
64 Deluded hopes Homer, Iliad 13.374–84; 16.830–42; 21.184–99; 22.331–3. Savaging of corpses 11.452–5; 16.836; 21.122–7; 22.335.6.
65 J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, p. 25.
66 Flaumenhaft, p. 16. Even the great Achilles is killed in an ambush by Paris and Apollo; see Dué and Ebbott, p. 351.
67 See Dale Sinos’ review of Anthony T. Edwards, Achilles in the Odyssey: Ideologies of Heroism in the Homeric Epic, in AJPh 109, 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 133–5.
68 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 70, 77.
69 Edwards, p. 26.
70 Edwards lists as evidence of post-Homeric negative comments on the ambush: Hesiod, Works and Days 702–705; Simonides 136 (in Diehl); Euripides, Rhesus 507, 560–61: ‘no brave man deigns to kill the enemy by stealth, but fights face to face’ (trans. by David Kovacs); Xenophon, Agesilaus 11.5 (cf. 2 12); Xenophon, Hiero 6.3 (cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.4–5). Herodotus 6.37.1; Herodotus 6.103.3; Euripides, Andromache 1114–5.
71 J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, p. 158.
72 This has not stopped commentators from criticising the night raid of Iliad 10 for being ‘ineffective’. See D. B. George, ‘Euripides’ Heracles 140–235: Staging and the stage iconography of Herakles’ bow’, GRBS 35 (1994), pp. 145–57 for a detailed study of the debate on Euripides’ Herakles; Dué and Ebbott, p. 61. They argue this in spite of the fact that the Achaeans themselves rejoice at the victory when Odysseus and Diomedes return.
Chapter 2: The Ill-fated Trojan Spy
1 This is a much expanded version of the article published as R. M. Sheldon, ‘The ill-fated Trojan spy’, Studies in Intelligence 31, 1 (1987), 35–9, reprinted in American Intelligence Journal 9, 3 (Fall 1988), 18–22. This same episode is discussed in Greek tragedy, namely the Rhesus, attributed, by some, to Euripides. Regardless of authorship, the Rhesus has always been understood as an Athenian tragedy produced in either the fifth or fourth centuries BCE. Several previous studies have examined how the myth of Dolon/Rhesus is treated in both genres. B. Fenik, Iliad X and the Rhesus, Collection Latomus vol. 73 (Brussels: Bercham, 1964), and Dué and Ebbott, pp. 28, 122 both believe the narrative traditions about Rhesus predate our Iliad.
2 Edwards does not even discuss the ambush; M. Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 136 calls it ‘… a disaster stylistically’ – heroically because of the disgraceful conduct exhibited by Odysseus and Diomedes, and thematically because it takes place in the dead night …’ Alexander Shewan wrote a spirited defence in his monograph The Lay of Dolon (London: Macmillan, 1911) in which he said: ‘There is hardly a textbook of Greek literature or handbook to Homer but regards it with disfavour, tempered only occasionally by a word of tolerant pity or faint praise’ (ibid. p. viii). R. M. Henry called it ‘one of the most worthless books of the Iliad from a poetical point of view’: R. M. Henry, ‘The place of the Doloneia in epic poetry’, CR 19 (1905), p. 192. See Agathe Thornton’s defence in Homer’s Iliad: Its Composition and the Motif of Supplication (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983), pp. 164–9.
3 See Dué and Ebbott, 7–9. The most recent and often-cited commentary on Iliad 10, B. Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 154, as part of the six-volume Cambridge University Press commentary edited by G. S. Kirk, asserts that the book ‘does not belong in our Iliad’. Leaf’s Commentary on the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1883) reserves his harshest criticism for Book 10. He refers to it as ‘turgid and tasteless’ (10.5), ‘strange’ (10.7), ‘unsuitable’ (10.8), ‘burlesque’ (10.84); Martin West’s Iliad treated Book 10 in its entirety as an interpolation that did not belong in the poem; see Dué and Ebbott, 23–4, 237–8, 290.
4 The recent study is Dué and Ebbott. The quotation comes from Shewan, p. viii.
5 The T. Scholion on the first line of Iliad 10 asserts the separate composition, claiming that it was added to the Iliad by Pisistratus. See Dué and Ebbott, p. 5. F. Eichhorn, Die Dolonie (Garmisch-Partenkirchen: Moser, 1973) wrote on the unity of Book 10 with the Iliad, in rebuttal to F. Ranke’s Homerische Untersuchungen I: Die Dolonie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881) and Friedrich Klingner, ‘über die Dolonie’, Hermes 75 (1940), pp. 337–68. See James P. Holoka’s review of Eichhorn, Die Dolonie, in The Classical World 69, 1 (Sept 1975), 72–3.
6 As for the question of whether both the Iliad and the Doloneia were written by the same person, see G. Danek, Studien zur Dolonie, Wiener Studien Beiheft 12 (Vienna: österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988), passim. See M. M. Willcock’s review Danek, Studien zur Dolonie, in Classical Review 39, 2 (1989), pp. 178–80, and W. C. Scott’s review of Danek, Studien zur Dolonie, in AJPh 112, 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 549–52. Most recently Dué and Ebbott, 3–13 put this question in focus as it relates to Iliad 10.
7 Fenik, Iliad X and the Rhesus.
8 Dué and Ebbott, pp. x, 12.
9 Dué and Ebbott, 9, 86.
10 Shewan, p. 34; Dué and Ebbott, p. 10.
11 A. Shewan’s defence of Iliad 10 was a reaction to the excesses of the scholarship of his time against single authorship. See Dué and Ebbott, 10–11 for a discussion of his Unitarian position. Shewan, p. 10 thinks the primary reason to accept the Doloneia as part of the Iliad was because it was, according to him, good poetry.
12 Dué and Ebbott, p. 13.
13 A. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 2nd edn 2000), p. 194 suggests that Iliad 10 may be a legitimate multiform of Iliad 9, i.e. both books orally composed with the same traditional poetic system, and both equally ‘Homeric.’ See Dué and Ebbott, pp. 13, 28.
14 Dué and Ebbott, p. 29.
15 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 284–5.
16 Dué and Ebbott, 128, 263 discuss the effect darkness has on the character’s senses and how it confuses friend and enemy. Heza, p. 227 points out that night usually stops combat, but at night, surprise attacks begin. Flaumenhaft, p. 9. The word ‘night’ occurs more frequently in Book 10 than in any other book of the Iliad – sixteen times. See N. Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 72.
17 Flaumenhaft, p. 9. Since sight
is limited at night, hearing becomes a more important sense, and what one hears is less certain and in need of interpretation. In fact, the interpretation of sounds becomes a key element in the capture of Dolon. On the role of visual and auditory perception, see Dué and Ebbott, 63–5.
18 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 10, 13, 31–3.
19 Homer, Iliad 10.35–41. On the idea that the Trojans may be planning an attack and that the Achaeans face destruction, see Dué and Ebbott, 265, 272.
20 All quotations in this chapter are from the Robert Fagles translation and use the line numbers from that edition.
21 Homer, Iliad 10.112–117.
22 Homer, Iliad 10.241–251.
23 Homer, Iliad 10.226.
24 Dué and Ebbott, p. 280; Flaumenhaft, p. 13; M. F. Williams, p. 11.
25 Flaumenhaft, p. 13. In the Homer, Odyssey 14.480 Odysseus says that this is prime time for wily schemes.
26 Homer, Iliad 10.258–266.
27 On returning as part of the poetics of ambush, see Dué and Ebbott, 77–8, 125, 287, 321, 375; Edwards, p. 22 identifies two leaders as a common feature of the Homeric ambush. R. Rabel, ‘The theme of need in Iliad 9–11’, Phoenix 45 (1991), pp. 288–91 sees the emphasis in Iliad 10 on co-operation among heroes to succeed in contrast to Achilles’ behaviour in Iliad 9. In Diomedes’ description of the ideal night raid team, noos and noeo are cited three times in three lines together with metis (Homer, Iliad 23.590). It is no surprise, therefore, that he chooses Odysseus whose associations with metis and noos are clear in Homer, Iliad 10.137 and 10.247.
28 In their commentary on these lines, Dué and Elliott, p. 79 discuss how the qualities of a willing heart and audacious spirit are appropriate to ambush.
29 Homer, Iliad 10.293–296.
30 The armour they wore is in many ways atypical. Most distinctive is what they wore on their heads. Diomedes and Odysseus wore leather skull caps. The Greek word πιλοσ (low helmet or skull cap) is of unknown derivation; Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), s.v. kataitux. Dué and Ebbott, 146, 252, 291–2 discuss Menelaus wearing a helmet that is bronze and unsuited for a spying mission. In contrast, Menelaus is portrayed as an ambusher in Homer, Odyssey 4.280, 14.470–471, 4.388–463.
31 Thornton, Homer’s Iliad, p. 75. In a well-known 1958 article, James Armstrong shows how formulaic arming scenes are employed at climactic moments in the poem with great effect. J. Armstrong, ‘The arming motif in the Iliad’, AJPh 79 (1958), pp. 337–54; Dué and Ebbott, pp. 54, 357. M. F. Williams, p. 13.
32 On the associations of wearing animals skins and ambush, see Dué and Ebbott, pp. 250–2; Cf. K. Reinhardt, Die Ilias und ihr Dichter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1961), pp. 247–8.
33 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 290–1.
34 The eyes his grandmother kissed when, as a child, he visited Autolycus (Homer, Odyssey 19.417). See Flaumenhaft, p. 20 for other eye references.
35 Flaumenhaft, p. 23. On the difference in the powers of observation between Diomedes and Dolon, see Dué and Ebbott, p. 331; and ibid. p. 372 on the reliance on senses other than sight.
36 Homer, Iliad 10.322–323. Dué and Ebbott, p. 297 point out that night herons exhibit ambush-like behaviour in their hunting. A heron waits while standing still for its prey to come into range at night. It also plunders the nests of other birds. The heron is the messenger of Athena, and this goddess most resembles Odysseus in that she embodies metis, dolos and noos, the skills that are the hallmark of ambush warfare (ibid. p. 364).
37 Homer, Iliad 10.330–331.
38 Homer, Iliad 10.348.
39 Homer, Iliad 10.350.
40 Homer, Iliad 8.557–562.
41 Homer, Iliad 10.372–380. For the anxiety about the night watch falling asleep, see ibid. 10.98. Dué and Ebbott, 261, 264, 324 on Dolon finding his way beyond the wall and ditch of the Greek encampment.
42 Homer, Iliad 10.370. Dué and Ebbott, p. 321 on Dolon’s swiftness.
43 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 315–17 defend Dolon against the condemnation of doing ‘work for pay’. Nestor says the spy will get kudos and gifts (doron). This is true of both sides. On the condemnations, see A. Schnapp-Goubeillon, ‘Le lion et le loup. Diomédie et Dolonie dans l’Iliade’, Quaderni di Storia 8 (1982), p. 58; J. Holoka, ‘Looking darkly: Reflections of status and decorum in Homer’, TAPA 113 (1983), 8–9; and N. Coffee, The Commerce of War: Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 62.
44 In later times, scouts who rode reconnaissance ahead of the main war party were ‘wolves’. Often these scouts wore a wolf skin, partly for camouflage but more importantly for symbolism, drawing to themselves the cunning and hunting ability of the wolf. This is common, for example, in Plains Indian mythology. Dué and Ebbott, p. 56 say only that cloaks and animal skins are significant elements in the night dressing scenes of Iliad 10. It may also be that in the epic tradition the bow was so closely associated with ambush warfare that a poet would naturally include it as part of a spy’s equipment (ibid. p. 62). L. Gernet, ‘Dolon le loup’, Mélanges Franz Cumont 4 (1936), pp. 196–7 suggests there was an initiation ritual involving the wearing of a wolf skin, and thus there is a religious and ritual background to Dolon’s attire. M. Davies, ‘Dolon and Rhesus’, Prometheus 31(2005), 31–2 sees Dolon as the ‘ambivalent helper’.
45 Homer, Iliad 10.390–394. Dué and Ebbott, pp. 328–30 discuss the marten skin and any associations with weasels and ‘weasily’ behaviour, or the ambushing behaviour of the marten. Davies, p. 32; Gernet, pp. 190–191, O. M. Davidson, ‘Dolon and Rhesus in the Iliad’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 30 (1979); and P. Wathelet, ‘Rhésos ou la Quête de l’immortalité’, Kernos 2 (1989), pp. 220–1 all discuss the significance of the wolf skin.
46 Homer, Iliad 10.398–406.
47 Homer, Iliad 418.
48 Homer, Iliad 10.421–423. Dué and Ebbott, p. 334.
49 Homer, Iliad 10.370–371.
50 Homer, Iliad 10.372.
51 Dolon’s fear is explicit here and the chattering of his teeth and paleness are the evidence. In Homer, the coward is exposed by his skin changing colours from his fear, as well as his inability to sit still and his pounding heart, whereas the brave man’s skin does not change colour. Cf. Homer, Iliad 13.276–286 with Homer, Odyssey 22.42 where the suitors are similarly described when they realise the stranger is Odysseus. Dué and Ebbott, p. 337.
52 Homer, Iliad 10.442–446.
53 Homer, Iliad 10.447–455.
54 Dué and Ebbott, p. 66.
55 Homer, Iliad 10.471–477.
56 Homer, Iliad 10.479–489.
57 In the Rhesus 573 they ask Dolon for the password to the Trojan camp. See Dué and Ebbott, pp. 128–9 on the need to tell the difference between friend and foe in the dark and the use of passwords in the Trojan camp.
58 Homer, Iliad 10.90–492.
59 Homer, Iliad 10.495–500.
60 Homer, Iliad 10.501–508.
61 Homer, Iliad 10.516–522.
62 See Dué and Ebbott, p. 355; on the supplication gesture, see K. Crotty, The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) and D. Wilson, Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Beheading an enemy occurs several times in Homeric epics, either as a killing or as an act carried out after a killing. Homer, Iliad 11.261, 13.201–205, 14.493–507, 17.126, 20.481–483, Homer, Odyssey 22.310–329. On mutilation and revenge in Homer, see J. E. Lendon, ‘Homeric vengeance and the outbreak of Greek wars’, in H. van Wees (ed.), War and Violence in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2000), esp. 3–11.
63 Dué and Ebbott, p. 319.
64 Gernet, pp. 192–6 and Davidson, p. 64 discuss the hanging of the wolf skin in a tree and connect it to initiation rituals. Dué and Ebbott, 358, 359 on the need to mark the spot where the spoils have been stored. G. Stagakis, ‘Athena and Dolo
n’s spoils’, Archaiognosia 5 (1987–8), 55–71 argues that the spoils were not dedicated to Athena.
65 See Dué and Ebbott, p. 124 who discuss Dolon’s name and the connection between the word dolos and the ambush theme, including spying missions.
66 Dué and Ebbott, p. 66; p. 349 on the lack of a night watch; p. 350 on the need for spatial information in an ambush.
67 Flaumenhaft, p. 14. The characters of Rhesus and Dolon are received and reworked in subsequent literature, namely the tragedy Rhesus and Virgil’s Aeneid. He seems to have had a much expanded role compared to the one we see in Iliad 10 and he was a much greater threat to the Greeks, on which see Dué and Ebbott, 89–151. Virgilian scholars have considered the points of comparison between the Doloneia and the night episode in Aeneid 9. For a recent discussion, see Dué and Ebbott, pp. 136–51.
68 Flaumenhaft, p. 14; B. Fenik discusses sources in Iliad X and the Rhesus; Dué and Ebbott, pp. 28, 96 discuss the elements of the spying mission, the ambush and the prophecy. Cf. H. Heusinger, Stilistische Untersuchungen zur Dolonie (Leipzig: Druck von C. and E. Vogel. 1939), 74–90.
69 On the question of who exactly took the horses of Rhesus, Odysseus or Diomedes, see G. Stagakis, ‘The hippoi of Rhesus’, Hellenika 37 (1986), pp. 231–41. He also discusses whether hippoi meant just the horses or the horses and the chariot too.
70 For example Flaumenhaft, p. 14. In an interlinear scholion on this line in the Venetus A manuscript, Aristarchus understood this ‘great deed’ to mean murdering Hector. Fenik, Iliad X and the Rhesus, p. 20 asserts that the Doloneia could portray night missions as an assassination attempt on Hector since an assassination attempt would be unacceptable portrayal of Odysseus and Diomedes. See Dué and Ebbott, 103, n. 20, 254–5, 299 for the opposite view. which compares the courage needed for night operations in Books 10 and 24. Cf. M. F. Williams, 17–20, and p. 22 on Hermes pretending to be on a reconnoitring expedition in Book 24.
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