Note 25 — Chapter VII

Mr. Murray writes: "It is in this way" (in phalanxes) "that people are said to be going to fight before each great battle begins. But strangely enough it is not at all in this way that they really fight when the battle is fairly joined, in the heart of the poem. In the heart of the poem, when the real fight comes, it is as a rule purely Mycenaean." We do not know how Mycenaeans fought in a general engagement. But people, in Homer, do fight as they "are said to be going to tight," when a schiltrom of spears is formed and is assailed, as in Iliad, xiii. 125-205. There the Trojan charge is checked by the hedge of spears. The general assault, the combined resistance, and the conduct of the most prominent men in defence and attack, is described, just as, at Waterloo and Culloden, historians describe the general conflict, and also the individual prowess of Shaw, Gillie Macbean, and others.