Ewart Oakeshott

"From somewhere in Western Asia people of a fighting race began to move southward and eastward about 1900 BC. In the following two centuries the southbound arm of this great prehistoric pincer movement founded the nations of Hatti (known to us as the Hittites) and Mittanni, and imposed upon the indigenous people of the Aegean an aristocracy which Homer called the "brown-haired Achaeans", and which we refer to as the Myceneans, while part of it pressed on to overthrow the weak and divided government of the 14th Dynasty of Egypt, occupying that land for 200 years. The eastbound arm moved upon North-West India, crushing the militarily helpless but otherwise magnificent and powerful people of the Indus.Modern ethnography has dubbed this race "Indo-European", and they are in every sense the founders of the modem world. From them the Greeks and Romans are sprung, and most of the races of India as well as the Celts and the Teutonic peoples of the North; they are the ancestors of India and of every Western civilization. The reason for their success was their power in war, power based on a concept of fighting which in the second millennium BC was entirely new.This was the use of horses, not as cavalry in the accepted sense but drawing light chariots each carrying one or two armed men, a highly mobile armoured fighting vehicle. When these chariots were deployed in squadrons, acting together as disciplined corps, then the ancient formations of pedestrian spearmen were doomed."

"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 men's minds as well as their actions. These tales were accepted as a true record of events in Homer's 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 Homer's 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."