| Sumario: | At the first "Many Faces of War" conference Larry Tritle offered a thoughtprovoking essay, entitled "Inside the Hoplite Agony" (published in AHB 2009), on the real-life experience and agony of hoplite fighting, challenging many accepted views and urging us to discuss this topic not from a detached outside perspective but from that of the men and societies involved. My paper intends to show that the Iliad offers us many opportunities to meet Larry's demands, although in a few cases it might force him to modify some of his views. In the first part I explain why and to what extent it is possible to find in Homer's battle descriptions evidence of an early form of mass fighting in somewhat dense formations. The importance of this possibility is obvious: the Iliad contains by far the longest, most detailed, and most intense depiction of battle in all of Greek literature; if this depiction is at least in part (and in identifiable parts) realistic and historical, the gain for our understanding of the real-life experience of Greek battle is potentially enormous, even if this concerns a form of fighting that stands at the very beginning of the development of the hoplite phalanx. In the second part I will use epic evidence to support, illustrate, and in some instances challenge Tritle's criticism of established views of hoplite fighting. In the third part I will present evidence that allows us to gain an insider perspective on the agony of those fighting in an intense infantry battle and thus to illustrate those aspects of battle that are rarely visible in other ancient sources and usually neglected in modern scholarship.
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