>reading the Iliad
>after every fight the victor loots the body and takes the armor
>this happens every single time
Were the moronic Trojans and the godlike Argives just glorified gypsies?
>reading the Iliad. >after every fight the victor loots the body and takes the armor
No
>fight because of some familial squabble
>camp near your house for 10 years
>have some weird honor system
>after shanking you they steal your shit
no sorry there's no difference
Wrong
So video games looting is real?
I wonder where those game designers thought of the idea of taking stuff from the people you defeat.
Have you never seen someone get robbed in a club line up? I was waiting in line for some shit club, I forget, I think I was like 21 years old at the time, and this dude was wearing a bunch of israeliteelry and had a really early stylish phone, like a StarTac or something, anyways, he got sucker punched and robbed for his wallet and israeliteelry by two dudes. Nobody in the line did jack shit because it all happened so fast and everyone was in a happy mood. Also lots of LiveLeak videos of people getting looted for their wallets and shoes by blacks during and after brawls.
The UI within a black's perception must be amazing.
>kill someone
>take their stuff
this is how it worked for thousands of years, and how it will soon work again
Valuable resources in a foreign land
Many Ukraine vids show people looting their dead enemies, war never changes
There were also Fortune Tellers.
Permission to loot killed enemies was likely an important part of motivating vassals to participate in warfare in an era when being wealthy made you much more dangerous on the battlefield.
Forget that shit, why do they always go in 2 pages long tangents about each other's backstory?
>read book about war
>people die
Why the frick is this allowed?
Well it was probably partly to illustrate the way that the Trojan war was conceived as being basically a world war. People came from all over.
There's the possibility that the reason they discuss their backgrounds is to make sure they aren't related. You could get miasma from any old murder but killing in wartime was expected. However most of the mythological cases of miasma i can think of are kinslaying related. Of course my only source for this is the fact that this literally happens in the Iliad. Two dudes realise they are like cousins or something, exchange some well wishes, and go find other people to fight. While it is unlikely that bronze age Greek warfare looked exactly like this it might be a reflection of an actual cultural desire to avoid killing kin even in times of war.
Although personally I like to imagine it is so they have the backstory of all the gear they loot.
>"wow dad, this shield is cool! Where did you get it?"
>"Well son, that was the shield of Puraltos of Phrygia, son of Akaltos, whom men called wise in his day. He had married a niece of King Priam of Troy, and sworn to fight for that same king's honour.."
>"OK, cool, thank's dad"
>"it served him well for 10 years of the siege, and time and again he fought valiantly,
>"ok"
>"but it's sturdy bronze could not protect him when the gods turned against the city, and I slew him there, upon the windy plains of Ilium.."
>>"Well son, that was the shield of Puraltos of Phrygia, son of Akaltos, whom men called wise in his day. He had married a niece of King Priam of Troy, and sworn to fight for that same king's honour.."
VGH
Take me back!
Because there's a chance that you may be related to or your town may have been founded by Diabeetes or Groiniad. This was a poem meant to be recited orally as a cultural heritage of the Hellenic world at the time. Just as today you want to appeal to the audience and give them a reason to care about your story, naming the Holy city of Nisa or vine-clad Arne both allows for poetic references to the vastness of Greece but also give your audience grasping points. We lack familiarity with these locations and people but at the time you'd either know them personally or understand from connotation that it shows the scale and character of those involved. Lineages are also very important to the Greeks because it reflected how they related to the divine, or just instantly told you that these were very important people. If a schmuck is the great-nephew of Poseidon then he's an elevated schmuck.
It's amazing how people don't understand the names and backstory is a narrative tool to hype up the audience members and feel proud and honoured that they are connected to the story. Same reason why the listing of the ships is important
In the Bronze Age, armor and arrows were scarce to come by so if you got your hands on it you needed to keep it even if it was immoral or from a fallen soldier.
every fight the victor loots the body and takes the armor
Based.
OP is moronic with a woman's knowledge of warfare. Looting enemy property in the battlefield has always happened and still happens. See the Taliban having Soviet gear after their war with them, and now they have American gear. Or just watch some Ukraine war footage, they're also always stealing each other's stuff.
Everyone up to today does that in wars. In the medieval era, knights took the horses and armor of whomever they captured or killed; in WW1, German officers' fur boots were extremely sought after by everyone else on the battlefield.
This is just how you made money in war until the industrial era. Now it's just how you ensure survival and comfort.
This guy made his money during the war by stealing gold and valuables from israeli families he sent to the ghettos. The sick Nazi Fascist bastard made his money off of crime and racist plundering!!
Theres a difference between looting from non-combatants (pillaging) (this is what barbarian nomads do) and from the enemy dead (economic necessity)
No there isnt
chevauchees are legit strategy
Well consider how expensive armor was.
Clothing in general was so expensive commoners would buy sandals one half at a time in the roman era
every fight the victor loots the body and takes the armor
Why is this so fricking funny
The fact that bronze age warfare seems to have been a privilege of the wealthy rather than something that the wealthy force the poors to do is sort of alien to us.
Their status makes it funnier
Imagine shooting a guy and then your first reaction is to nick is body armor and knaifu, maybe some patches too
*Had to edit this I guess I was imagining Hector loot some petty noble's second son
Theirs literally IDF soldiers who use abadoned house kitchens to make cooking videos while families are starving in rubble. It' always been a thing to steal from those you killed, and that behavior will never stop
The Israelis aren't even funny about it. Listening to reports from Greeks fight wars is kino, like an action film. Listening to the running list of Israeli atrocities is like a horror film where the dirty little criminal keeps winning.
Agreed. It's so crazy how Israelis are making some of the most tone deaf, moronic, and evil war media I've ever seen throughout history without showing people dead. While Palestinians are making real-life cod montages that never stop being cool and heroic
Parachuting into a concert of AIDs-ridden bawds and drug users is both kino and funny, I agree
As you often find it there was an honor culture married to economic incentives that died down a bit once warfare became more "organized" and less dependent on individual heroism. We must think what an armor and weapon represented: the pride and wealth of a man. Combine that with the fact that heroes were often semi-divine, and city-states and areas being given legitimacy because of heroic lineage traced back to gods or other supernatural beings, and you see how important the armor was even after you slew its owner. We know that the Greeks heavily politicized myth. A local river deity would of course be the ancestor of your local well-to-dos, of course your city had a patron from on high. Warfare was also extremely costly and depended on citizens arming themselves. It was also in Homeric times small-scale enough to where heroes were very important, although descriptions of fighting over the corpses of heroes do sometimes sound like protophalanxes.
We know that they wanted to earn glory with trophies but also greatly feared it themselves. A proper burial was seen as very important. A whole corpse properly treated was given great religious importance with the import extending even into the afterlife. One only needs to read the lines from Sarpedon to Glaucus on realizing that he is himself about to die:
>“Dear Glaucus, warrior amid men of war, now in good sooth it behoveth thee to quit thee as a spearman and a dauntless warrior; now be evil war thy heart's desire if indeed thou art swift to fight. [495] First fare thou up and down everywhere, and urge on the leaders of the Lycians to fight for Sarpedon, and thereafter thyself do battle with the bronze in my defence. For to thee even in time to come shall I be a reproach and a hanging of the head, all thy days continually, [500] if so be the Achaeans shall spoil me of my armour, now that I am fallen amid the gathering of the ships. Nay, hold thy ground valiantly, and urge on all the host.”
Or later on about the importance of regaining the body for burial:
> “To thee, verily, Menelaus, shall there be shame and a hanging of the head, if the trusty comrade of lordly Achilles he torn by swift dogs beneath the wall of the Trojans. Nay, hold thy ground valiantly, and urge on all the host.”
There is of course greed and pride and other hubristic elements at play in the Iliad. Some classical scholars posit that Iliad shows a transition into chiefdoms where the leaders became more akin to that charming germanic kenning of "ring-gifters". Leading away from an individualistic short term heroism into long-term redistribution of spoils. That redistributionism is the only way that an extended war could have taken place in the socio-economic realities of Ancient Greece: ten years represents how many lost harvests for these adventurers? We see that economic power being used against Achilles by Agamemnon ;offering Achilles first choice of spoils means that ultimately Agamemnon has the gifting-right.
They don't do that in the Icelandic sagas although they are all greedy and shameless in their pursuit of wealth
You read how nice Achilles' armor and weaponry is, right? One would have to be stupid not to take fancy shit like that after bodying it's owner.
Somebody has never read the art of war. Supplies and supply lines are hard to maintain so where you can you take supplies from your enemies. Yes this does include looting corpses.
My uncle got drunk and told me that him and his buddies would pull gold teeth put of dead Vietcong soldiers mouths after combat died down. I think looting the dead is probably pretty natural in war. Plus, bronze and horses were a scarce resource / valuable. If you slay a noble you take his goods. Even knights would strip armor from fallen soldiers as well.