Ewart Oakeshott

"The material [Homer] used (c. 850 BC) had existed for many hundreds of years, passed on orally. In the most vivid and lively language he gives a dear picture of mens minds as well as their actions. These tales were accepted as a true record of events in Homers own time and in classical Greece as well as during the whole of the Roman period and throughout the Middle Ages; it was the scepticism of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scholarship which damned them as being mere fairy-tales. Then, during the last years of the nineteenth century, the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans transmuted what was thought to be the base metal of unfounded legend into the pure gold of ascertained fact. They uncovered Troy itself and Golden Mycenae, and the palaces of Minos in Crete...Wonderful as these material discoveries were, perhaps their greatest value was the proof that the story of Troy was no legend, but an historical event. This makes sense of the vivid realism of Homers characters, his attention to small details of behaviour—how clearly we see the sleeping Diomedes...Here indeed is flesh to cover the archaeological bones."

"For more than 1,000 years the aristocratic charioteer was the arbiter of battle all over the world. Then, during the fourth century BC army formations similar to the ancient style of Egypt appeared in an infinitely more formidable guise—the legions of Rome. It was not long before the pendulum had swung and the legions swept everything before them, and for the next 600 years the Roman infantry was almost the only military force to be reckoned with in the civilized world. Even so, behind her northern and eastern frontiers were many nations of unsubdued barbarians...These nations were the force which eventually swung the pendulum back; they flooded into the Empire, not with chariots as of old, but as heavy cavalry. The weapon of impact had come into its own again, and would be the dominant force in the world until the English cloth-yard arrow began to weaken it during the fourteenth century; it finally gave way when the perfection of gunpowder in the fifteenth century brought in its turn another concept of war."