Page 373 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

3 20 Bronze and Iron [1230-1160 b.c.]

hooters would tell tales of raids and booty, storms and sea battles
and the old men would cap them with waves made larger and
fights made fiercer by an extra generation of recounting. And the
court minstrel, or one of his guild passing through on a visit,
would silence them all by a lute-accompanied lay of the loves
and battles of the gods and the deeds of the heroes of old, heroes
even earlier than Perseus the dragon killer and Theseus the slayer
of the Minotaur.
But winter and summer alike there was always weapon
training for the boys. Under the harsh-tongued guidance of the
drillmaster, they spent long hours casting at marks with the
bronze-tipped throwing spears, shooting with the short sinew-
backed bow, and fencing with man-sized swords and the light
round shields. When they were ten years old they began on
chariotry, and from then on had to use bow and javelin from the
two-man cars, taking it in turns, the one to drive while the
other shot. And two years later they graduated to ship fighting,
driving in the early morning the nine miles of road from the
castle to the harbor town and spending the day in ten-oared
boats manned by the sons of the citadel troops, learning how to
handle and maneuver the long galleys of the battle fleet. It was a
long and well-organized training, interspersed—when the fleet
was home—with specialist courses in siege warfare, deployment,
bronze casting, and the equipment and provisioning of expedi­
tionary commandos.
It was an exhaustive education, but the brothers knew that
warfare was to be their life, as much as commerce and seafaring
was the life of the people living in the harbor town, and fanning
the life of the men of the hamlets scattered through the valley.
That town and those hamlets were theirs to defend, and
beyond them was a whole rich world to plunder. And, more im­
mediately, there was the prospect, in a very few years, of sailing
out with their father on their own first expedition.
In the meantime, in their earliest teens, they took their
chariots and an escort in the summers and went visiting over the
hills to King Tyndareos in Sparta or the young King Nestor in
Pylos on the east coast; and most often to their old grandfather,
King Pelops of Elis just south of the Gulf of Corinth.