The lack of watches among the allies creates a situation ripe for ambush, and we can at least consider the possibility that Dolon gives this information, as well as the information about Rhesos and the Thracians in his next response, to divert the Achaeans away from the Trojans themselves. We have seen night watches arranged by the Trojans before this night: when the previous night fell, Priam set up a night watch around the city of Troy (Iliad 7.370–371; these same lines appear again at Iliad 18.298–299, when Hektor likewise sets up a night watch on the night following this one). The implication of those watches is that a night ambush may happen on any night (and, of course, we do hear about such episodes at Troy at Odyssey 4.244–258 and Odyssey 14.468–503). Because the Trojan army and its allies are spending this night out on the Trojan plain, however, more elaborate arrangements are made as night falls at the end of Iliad 8. The night watch in the city will on this night be manned by elders and boys, while the women light fires, all to prevent an attack on the city while the army is outside it (Iliad 8.517–522). Hektor also establishes a watch “on ourselves” (Iliad 8.529), and the fires he orders lit so that they can see if the Achaeans try to sail away (Iliad 8.507–511) number one thousand, with fifty men and their horses stationed at each (Iliad 8.562–565). The allies are not mentioned separately at this point, but Dolon’s words here make it appear that they are not included in those groups around the watch fires. At the beginning of Iliad 10, we can recall, Agamemnon both saw these fires and heard music and men talking around them (Iliad 10.11–13). So there is a key contrast here between the awake and watchful Trojans and the sleeping allies—and also one between the kind of watch that the Achaeans arrange for the whole army (see Iliad 9.66–88) and the more diffuse watches of the Trojans.
This latter arrangement may show how unusual the situation is for the Trojans: camping out on the plain for the first time, they are grouped as if they had gone to their family homes within the city. This arrangement is also consistent with what we see of the Trojans elsewhere in the Iliad. Gould argues that Trojan society “is a model based on an almost complete equation between the city of Troy and the οἶκος ‘household/family’ of Priam, with the consequence that ties of obligation in Troy are seen as those that obtain within an extended family” (2001:343–344). The fact that the watch fires are here called “home-fires” (πυρὸς ἐσχάραι, 10.418) reinforces the idea that these are family groups, each responsible for its own watch.