THE SCENE: The mustering of a massive army is rendered incomparably poetic in Homer’s Iliad.
THE TEXT: As ravening fire rips through big stands of timber high on a mountain ridge and the blaze flares miles away, so from the marching troops the blaze of bronze armor, splendid and superhuman, flared across the earth, flashing into the air to hit the skies.
Armies gathering now as the huge flocks on flocks of winging birds, geese or cranes or swans with their long lancing necks – circling Asian marshes round the Cayster outflow, wheeling in all directions, glorying in their wings – keep on landing, advancing, wave on shrieking wave and the tidal flats resound. So tribe on tribe, pouring out of the ships and shelters, marched across the Scamander plain and the earth shook, tremendous thunder from under trampling men and horses drawing into position down the Scamander meadow flats breaking into flower – men by the thousands, numberless as the leaves and spears that flower forth in spring.
The armies massing … crowding thick-and-fast as the swarms of flies seething over the shepherds’ stall in the first spring days when the buckets flood with milk – so many long-haired Achaeans swarmed across the plain to confront the Trojans, fired to smash their lines.
The armies grouping now – as seasoned goatherds split their wide-ranging flocks into packs with ease when herds have mixed together down the pasture: so the captains formed their tight platoons, detaching right and left, moving up for action – and there in the midst strode powerful Agamemnon, eyes and head like Zeus who loves the lighting, great in the girth like Ares, god of battles, broad through the chest like sea lord Poseideon. Like a bull rising head and shoulders over the herds, a royal bull rearing over his flocks of driven cattle – so imposing was Atreus’ son, so Zeus made him that day, towering over fighters, looming over armies.
– The Iliad, Homer, 8th Century BC
