Roel Konijnendijk On Homer And Ancient Greece

Wikipedia:

Roel Konijnendijk is a Dutch historian working in the United Kingdom. He is known for his research on Classical Greek warfare and military thought, and has authored the book Classical Greek Tactics.

Konijnendijk was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and Leiden. He has taught Greek History at Birkbeck, University of Warwick, University of Edinburgh, New College, Oxford, and Lincoln College, Oxford. He has contributed to a number of books on the topics of Classical Greek warfare, the military reforms of Iphicrates, Athenian democracy, and the military history of Sparta. He is also cited as an expert on the training and organization of Classical Greek and Persian armies.

He is a proponent of the theory that Greek warfare was both more brutal than some modern scholars have described, and that it was driven by practicality rather than ritual. His research challenges the so-called “California School” of Greek military scholarship, arguing that its theories were largely based on outdated 19th-century models.

An excerpt from, “WarTalk: Ancient Greece Edition” by Jordan Schneider, China Talk, July 26, 2026:

Homeric Heroes

Justin: You mentioned the Iliad earlier. There are long passages that talk about Ajax being imbued and able to draw blood from Ares, Hector being able to fight off the gods, fighting as an individual and heaping bodies on the pyres. Why isn’t that something held up in actual Greek warfare? Why is it the unit, the phalanx, what the body is able to do, when in Homer it’s very much a focus on the capabilities of the heroes and their individual abilities in battle?

Roel Konijnendijk: That’s a huge question, because it’s one of the key differences between how we picture classical Greek hoplite warfare and how we picture Homeric warfare, which is all about singular heroes. The most compelling way to account for it is that society changed. In this earlier world you have far fewer people wealthy enough to afford full armor. They lord it over others. They’re literally called basileis in the poem, which means kings in later Greek, lords, princes, with a much more exalted station, and there are fewer of them. One of the ways they justify their position is by being better warriors. It brings personal glory, but it also makes the ordinary people, the laos, look at them and say, okay, fair enough, of course he’s in charge, because he’s a badass. So it feeds into itself. You have a system of status that in reality is based on wealth, but that has an ideology that it’s based on merit, and they have to prove that in these narratives by achieving feats beyond ordinary people. And to some extent it’s probably true. If you were fully decked out in armor, you’d be more willing to go to the front and throw a javelin at your man than if you were showing up in your tunic picking up a rock from the ground.

You get this in archaic poetry outside Homer as well, and even in some tomb monuments right down to the end of the archaic period, where they claim, I was with the promachoi, I was with the front-fighters. We shouldn’t see that as a front rank. It sometimes gets mistranslated as a front rank in a formation. No, these guys go out in front of others. They challenge their enemies directly. In the Iliad they literally do this. They’ll say, you over there, I know you, I knew your dad, now fight me. This kind of very personal, deliberately showmanship way of fighting, because these guys depend on it.

Over time, of course, that becomes subsumed by the communal need to work together to be militarily effective. The more of these heavily armored guys you have, the more effective they are working together. So you have to suppress that impulse, get rid of this urge to stand out in front and prove yourself. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t go away completely. There are really strong anecdotes right down to the Persian Wars and beyond of individual warriors who deliberately go out in front, challenge enemies to single combat, try to make themselves conspicuous, make sure everybody sees who they are and knows they did something above and beyond what’s asked of the ordinary hoplite. They still learn, they get spoon-fed this idea that that’s how you behave as a hero. So it sits a bit awkwardly. There’s always this tendency to go out and be a Homeric hero, even though there’s no longer really a place for it.

Bite the Dust

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with glorifying violence and then go to how violent these fights actually were. These famous similes in the Iliad, and a bit in the Odyssey too, where the blood is spurting everywhere, look how badass I am. It makes for kind of nauseous reading in 2026, Roel. How do you process how excited they were to see literal heads roll?

Roel Konijnendijk: The phrase “bite the dust” is Homeric. That’s a phrase we get from Homer, where people literally die, fall over, and bite the dust, grimacing and falling into the sand. Especially in the Iliad, you get these really graphic descriptions of exactly what happens when a spear meets a face, how many teeth are knocked out on its way through. It’s really quite shocking.

But that is really unique. There aren’t many sources that go into such graphic detail. That’s something Homer in particular was really interested in. Part of it is the spectacle. They’re playing it up to let you know the stakes are very high, this is serious. They’re also not trying to sugarcoat that it’s a war. The more you amplify the horror of it, the more you also amplify the heroism of people who endure it, which is still a factor in modern war fiction. And the other thing is something we can relate to when watching modern action movies. There’s a degree of spectacle in gore that makes it more interesting to watch. The more you push the envelope of how gruesome something is, the more it becomes almost entertaining in its gruesomeness. These poems needed that. They have an audience, they’re being performed, they’re being sung, and that audience needs to be engaged. If what they want to hear is how many organs are severed before the spear comes out the other end, that’s something Homer will give you.

How you deal with that as a modern reader is actually a good reminder that they are not trying to say war isn’t horrific. They are not arguing that this is all beautiful and everybody’s a hero. They are saying that if you’re on the wrong end of Achilles, you’re going to have a really terrible time and die in agony. And that is not something that’s celebrated, because Achilles is not celebrated. We’re not here to say he’s the hero, he should win, the good guys win, we get our happy ending. He is a man who transgresses the rules of human society. He is behaving badly in that moment, and his victims are suffering for it. So it’s necessary for Homer to say, this is not nice and clean, this is a horrible act of violence.

Jordan Schneider: Can we do my favorite one? The suitors getting piled up like fish. Let me find the quote.

Roel Konijnendijk: What’s very cool in that scene, you get them picking up the little tables to use as shields. They’re improvising weaponry in the banqueting hall. And there are vase paintings of that, you see them picking up little tables to hold up with arrows sticking out. Greeks realized how theatrical that was. They absolutely wanted to show you that.

Jordan Schneider: All right, this is from Fagles. “He found them one and all in blood and dust, great hauls of them down and out like fish that fishermen drag from the churning grey surf and loop in coiling nets, and fling ashore on a sweeping hook of beach, some noble catch heaped on the sand, twitching, lusting for fresh salt sea, but the sun god hammers them and burns their lives out, so the suitors lay in heaps, corpse covering corpse.” Eat your heart out, Christopher Nolan.

Roel Konijnendijk: It’s a hundred and eight of them. You have to remember there are a hundred and eight suitors, they’re numbered. So this is an absolute slaughter. He’s throwing fish out onto dry land and they’re being beaten to death by the sun god, dried out. But there’s another simile that’s really gruesome, when he’s talking about how the Cyclops treats the crew of Odysseus. He grabs them two at a time and smashes their heads against the floor. And the simile he uses is, like you would a puppy. This is how you kill puppies, I guess puppies you don’t want, dashing their heads against the floor until there’s brains everywhere. That’s how he puts it. This is a world in which perhaps life isn’t always treated with the same amount of reverence that we tend to be taught by our own society to have.

Jordan Schneider: When you read the Old Testament in synagogue, the rabbis have to keep doing this thing, being like, yeah, it’s really bad, but God’s still a nice guy in the end, don’t index too much on all this smiting. When you read Homer, you don’t have to turn them into heroes or conclude that Homer’s a good person and a positive influence on your life. It’s almost easier to accept that this is what some human being was thinking twenty-eight hundred years ago, and just go from there, live in their head, as opposed to ethically justifying how it’s still okay somehow.

Roel Konijnendijk: It’s similar to how I like that the new Odyssey has already generated so much discourse, because when you see these scenes, you have to imagine that even in the ancient Greek world this was meant to generate discourse. As you’re hearing this song from the bard, you have to ask yourself, do we think this is right? Do we think this is proportional? Do we think this is the correct response to the situation? To some extent, killing the suitors, yeah, they were very bad guests, they were misbehaving, a threat to the household and the community. You’re led to think this is good riddance. But the poem immediately then says, of course, they were prominent people in Ithacan society from all the surrounding islets, and so immediately when you kill them, their families show up with weapons and demand satisfaction. Odysseus at the end is with Telemachus and his dad Laertes at the farm, preparing to die, because it’s three against an army, an army of the families of the suitors coming to kill them.

And the only reason they survive is because the gods literally step in and say, that’s enough, you’re going to stop fighting now. But the idea is, you can say these individual acts are morally justified, whatever, but there’s always this sense in Homer that they do have consequences. You can’t just do whatever you want because you think you’re doing the right thing. You have to accept that somebody else is going to think you did something horrible, or try to avenge it. There is more in this world than your own personal relationship to your morality.

Battlefield Ethics

Tony Stark: There’s some modern discourse, particularly in America, that battlefield ethics are a modern creation. I think the story of Achilles is perhaps the best argument against that. But can you talk about how battlefield ethics were discussed and considered during that time period?

Roel Konijnendijk: There is some evidence that the Greeks were particularly brutal in battle. They don’t recognize a lot of different kinds of battlefield ethical restraint. That’s one of the arguments I made in my book: fundamentally, there are a lot of ideas that they supposedly thought all sorts of things were distasteful, like attacking by surprise or killing wounded people. They don’t really have those restrictions. There are only a few rules they recognize. But they do recognize them, and they acknowledge there are ways you can transgress. One is if somebody is a suppliant at a temple, stretching out their hands to seek the protection of a divinity. Those people are off limits. That doesn’t mean they never get killed, there are various occasions when the Greeks do kill them. But that is understood to invoke a curse upon you, your family into the nth generation is going to be cursed, the gods are going to want comeuppance.

These understandings exist both in a religious sphere, envoys of the gods, people going to the Olympics to attend a festival dedicated to Zeus, those people you can’t touch, there’s a truce, hands off, because they’re sacred. But there are also practical understandings. If somebody supplicates you, reaches out to clasp your knees and throw themselves at your mercy, you can kill them, and in the Iliad, when Menelaus wants to offer mercy to somebody who does this, Agamemnon steps in and says, no, you should kill them all. But it isn’t good. This is something you shouldn’t do. If people have fallen into your hands as prisoners, there are very rare occasions when they’re mutilated. Killed, they sometimes are, but mutilated is very rare. You very rarely mutilate either corpses or live captives. So these things are absolutely recognized by the Greeks as just wrong. You don’t do that.

Violence against women and children is sometimes practiced, but sometimes also deliberately eschewed. They try to avoid it. It depends on the situation. In some cases they are horrifically violent against women and children. The enslavement process they often go through is absolutely horrific, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat that. But sometimes the population of a city that surrenders from siege is allowed to go free, allowed to become refugees and look after themselves. So there are ways the Greeks recognize that it is better to be good. That doesn’t always restrict their actions, but they do recognize a morality in those actions.

Jordan Schneider: Coming back to the Odyssey. At the end we have Odysseus. He gets three supplicants, saves two, kills one. It’s unclear where exactly he draws the line. And then he murders some of his female slaves, who he’s blaming for getting raped by the suitors. It seems like you’re getting a bit of that judgment in there from Homer, even though he’s trying to make you feel for the guy.

Roel Konijnendijk: Absolutely. I think this is one of those cases, especially that scene where he kills the enslaved women in his own household because they collaborated with the suitors. This is something that also happened, for instance, in occupied Europe after the liberation, a lot of women in local populations suffered horrific punishment and ostracism because they had relations with the occupying forces, with the Nazis. You can say they weren’t doing that out of free will, or you could say the Netherlands, for instance, was occupied for almost five years. You have a reality that doesn’t seem to be going away, so you deal with it, you try to continue a normal life as best you can. Some of that may be open to people’s free will, some may not. But populations do have a tendency to react as if it’s all deliberate collaboration with the enemy. That is often unfair, but it’s also something that happens. So that’s one of those occasions where Homer wants you to talk about it, to discuss it and say, do you think this is right? Do you think Odysseus and Telemachus are justified, or do you think this is where he goes too far?

That’s also true in the Iliad, which is also about people transgressing. You can debate who the good guys and bad guys are, but there’s always people who cross a line. Agamemnon is not wrong to say he should be the most honored, because he has the largest contribution and the most authority in the army. But when he steals Briseis from Achilles and demands her specifically as his prize, he’s going too far, because he’s not just granting himself the highest honor, which everybody agrees he deserves, he’s taking it away from someone else. And then later, when he tries to make up for it, saying, okay, Achilles, I’m sorry, have all the gifts you could possibly imagine, a huge list including entire cities, if you’ll just come back into the fold and fight again, and Achilles refuses. Then we’re meant to understand it’s Achilles who’s transgressing. He refuses a good compromise, a generous offer, and isn’t willing to play ball with the way human society works. When someone tries to say sorry and you say, no, I don’t forgive you, then the onus comes to be on you. And Achilles goes further and further from there. Ultimately he takes a couple of captured Trojan prisoners of war and throws them onto Patroclus’s funeral pyre. And every Greek knows that’s going too far. You’re making human sacrifices to your buddy. This is absolutely unacceptable.

So there are a lot of those moments where Homer’s deliberately trying to tell you, yeah, you can come along with me as I describe this very emotional, recognizable, relatable response to something. But I’m also going to show you there’s a limit to how much you’re willing to stomach, how much you’re willing to say, okay, I’m with this character so far, I believe they’re doing the right thing. And then he says, okay, but how about now? He keeps pushing that. I think the composers of this poem want you to think about what’s right in these different scenarios.

Immortality or Glory

Justin: Achilles is the greatest hero, name written in the stars, talked about for thousands of years. And then his oration as a ghost, when he says if he was given the choice again between being immortal and being remembered forever, he would choose to be immortal, because death is terrible. What is your interpretation of what Homer was trying to say about the value of legacy and martial virtue versus just being alive?

Roel Konijnendijk: It’s hard to know. You have those two contradicting accounts, that Achilles very deliberately chooses a short life and eternal glory, and then once he’s dead and shows up briefly in the Odyssey, he says, actually, it was wrong. There isn’t necessarily a single morality there. It makes sense from the perspective that Homer is trying to explore the human condition. What good is anything to you if you’re dead? What’s the point of having eternal glory and your name remembered if you’re not around? You can’t experience anything. The way they describe the underworld, there are shades living in an eternal fog in the darkness. There’s nothing for them, they’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they’re suffering. So he would have given up a lot to have a few more years just living life, enjoying the things you enjoy and suffering the things you suffer as a human being.

The Greeks certainly didn’t think being alive was good per se. The life of an ordinary person was very hard. There’s a lot of poetry, like Hesiod’s Works and Days, describing how you have to work really hard to live even a little bit comfortably. It’s hard, there are cold winters and hot summers and hard work and bad people. But all of that still means you get to experience things. All of us who think about the afterlife in any form usually consider, is it better to be in whatever that place is, or better to keep on doing this, to keep experiencing my own consciousness in this world?

It’s one of the ways you can see that even though this poem was composed twenty-seven hundred years ago, in the form we have, it’s incredibly prescient in the sense of which questions are going to matter, which are going to keep us talking for a very long time. When you read Works and Days, you’ll find very little that makes you go, yeah, I could use this to open a conversation about my view on life. Whereas the Odyssey is absolutely packed with it. We know why this survived. It keeps us talking, keeps us thinking, keeps us making this same consideration of, well, was Achilles wrong? What should he have done? That must have been at the forefront of the minds of all these people who live in a world where you somewhat regularly go to war yourself, risk your life in battle, where the only reward you can expect to receive is a memory, to be well remembered as a person who died doing what’s right as a citizen. You have to wonder, do I want that, or is it better to run away so I can live a little bit longer? That’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds in that world, and after.

Jordan Schneider: If you’re thinking about what literature is going to last, and by last we mean hundreds, thousands of years, it can’t just be compelling, it can’t just be the blood-gore popcorn stuff. It needs to have people split on it, reasonable people split, and continue to split on it in totally different cultural contexts, so you want to keep talking about it. I’m sure there are Hesiod arguments about is this god the better god or that god the better god, but no one cares once Christ comes around. Getting on those timeless human themes is a pretty hard thing to do in the moment. Hats off to Homer for pulling it off.

Roel Konijnendijk: Some of it is timeless. Other things you’re just like, okay, there must have been an environment in which this was very useful, but I don’t think now we need Hesiod to explain to us that we shouldn’t piss in the river where we get our water. Which he spends some time explaining.

Tony Stark: Unfortunately, battlefield hygiene is still a challenge for a lot of folks.

Justin: If you had worked with privates in the military, you would know that you still need to teach that lesson regularly. I mean, tie it to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of America. It was a Prussian who came over and had to look at Washington and be like, you recognize that your men are shitting next to where they’re cooking their food, right? That’s the reason you all have dysentery.

Roel Konijnendijk: That’s that Prussian military method rearing its head again. I read about that, when Steuben’s training the Continental Army, where he started out drilling Washington’s guard and then they passed it on to the rest of the army. The idea there is very much similar to the Greek situation, where these are militia that have received very little training and are constantly being defeated by a more professional force. And what they’re learning is not that difficult. It was like two weeks that he spent training them. And that’s for musket drill, way more complicated than what Greek hoplites would have to do. So just that basic element, it’s not that you have a lot of trouble figuring it out, it’s that you need someone to tell you, okay, this is what you’re going to do, and take you through your paces, set aside the time, which they had in Valley Forge. And you come out a much more effective force. Sometimes you just need someone to drop in and say, here’s how you can get much better very easily.

This is one of the ways knowledge was passed on in a period before you had dedicated treatises. You had these poems aspiring to teach everything, from morality to the practicalities of military organization and combat and farming and proper marriage relations. Those things are discussed and composed into songs and texts that last longer, precisely because there’s no community college, no way to get this from a professional. You’re passing it around as stories, as oral tradition, and eventually as written poetry.