The Heroic Period--Tribal Wars--The Chariot--Characteristics of Greek Warriors--The Spartans--The Athenian Array--Greek Arms--Cavalry--Greek Sieges--Greek Ships--The Trireme. Scarcely any changes seem to have taken place in the character of the offensive and defensive arms of the Greeks from the most ancient period until the Roman time, though the conduct of warfare made enormous advances in the thousand years between the Trojan War and the age of Alexander the Great and his successors. Our authorities for the earliest period are but few, but the wars of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. have been carefully described by historians, some of whom themselves possessed military knowledge. We must therefore be content to obtain our knowledge of warfare in early times from the descriptions of poets, who naturally aimed at a very different result from the historian. The Homeric Epics are not authorities which we can follow absolutely in every respect, but still they enable us to form a picture of the warfare of that period, and gain some general notion of the mode in which it was conducted. The military conditions of that time bore the same patriarchal character which characterised the government of the heroic age. Greece, which even in the historic age was broken up into a number of separate nationalities, was in the heroic period merely a collection of tribes living in constant feud with one another, and undertaking continual predatory expeditions on their neighbours’ territory; the nobles placing themselves at the head of a number of enterprising men, and regarding these proceedings as in no way dishonourable to them. Sometimes a great common undertaking combined several tribes under one head, but even then the power of this chief was by no means an unlimited one; the separate tribes who took part in the expedition under their own princes and nobles stood under their immediate command, and it depended on the goodwill of these little kings whether they submitted to the ordinances of the chief commander or not. Consequently there could be no question of a common arrangement of the army, or of a subdivision of the people according to the nature of the arms they used; the battle order was drawn up according to tribes.