Homer and His Age

Another plan is to maintain that if the poet does not in any case mention a corslet, there was no corslet. Thus in V. 99, an arrow strikes Diomede "hard by the right shoulder, the plate of the corslet." Thirteen lines later (V. 112, 113) "Sthenelus drew the swift shaft right through out of Diomede's shoulder, and the blood darted up through the pliant chiton." We do not know what the word here translated "pliant" {Greek: streptos} means, and Aristarchus seems to have thought it was "a coat of mail, chain, or scale armour." If so, here is the corslet, but in this case, if a corslet or jack with intertwisted small plates or scales or rings of bronze be meant, gualon cannot mean a large "plate," as it does. Mr. Ridgeway says, "It seems certain that {Greek: streptos chitoon} means, as Aristarchus held, a shirt of mail." {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p, 306.} Mr. Leaf says just the reverse. As usual, we come to a deadlock; a clash of learned opinion. But any one can see that, in the space of thirteen lines, no poet or interpolator who wrote V. i 12, i 13 could forget that Diomede was said to be wearing a corslet in V. 99; and even if the poet could forget, which is out of the question, the editor of 540 B.C. was simply defrauding his employer, Piaistratus, if he did not bring a remedy for the stupid fault of the poet. When this or that hero is not specifically said to be wearing a corslet, it is usually because the poet has no occasion to mention it, though, as we have seen, a man is occasionally smitten, in the midriff, say, without any remark on the flimsy piece of mail.

That corslets are usually taken for granted as present by the poet, even when they are not explicitly named, seems certain. He constantly represents the heroes as "stripping the pieces of mail" {Greek: teuchea}, when they have time and opportunity, from fallen foes. If only the shield is taken, if there is nothing else in the way of bronze body armour to take, why have we the plural, {Greek: teuchea}? The corslet, as well as the shield, must be intended. The stripping is usually "from the shoulders," and it is "from his shoulders" that Hector hopes to strip the corslet of Diomede (Iliad, VIII. 195) in a passage, to be sure, which the critics think interpolated. However this may be, the stripping of the (same Greek characters), cannot be the mere seizure of the shield, but must refer to other pieces of armour: "all the pieces of armour." So other pieces of defensive armour besides the shield are throughout taken for granted. If they were not there they could not be stripped. It is the chitons that Agamemnon does something to, in the case of two fallen foes (Iliad, XI. 100), and Aristarchus thought that these chitons were corslets. But the passage is obscure. In Iliad, XI. 373, when Diomede strips helmet from head, shield from shoulder, corslet from breast of Agastrophus, Reichel was for excising the corslet, because it was not mentioned when the hero was struck on the hip joint. I do not see that an inefficient corslet would protect the hip joint. To do that, in our eighteenth century cavalry armour, was the business of a zoster, as may be seen in a portrait of the Chevalier de St. George in youth. It is a thick ribbed zoster that protects the hip joints of the king.

Finally, Mr. Evans observes that the western invaders of Egypt, under Rameses III, are armed, on the monuments, with cuirasses formed of a succession of plates, "horizontal, or rising in a double curve," while the Enkomi ivories, already referred to, corroborate the existence of corslet, zoster, and zoma as articles of defensive armour. {Footnote: Journal of Anthropological Institute, xxx. p. 213.} "Recent discoveries," says Mr. Evans, "thus supply a double corroboration of the Homeric tradition which carries back the use of the round shield and the cuirass or {Greek: thoraex} to the earlier epic period… With such a representation before us, a series of Homeric passages on which Dr. Reichel… has exhausted his powers of destructive criticism, becomes readily intelligible." {Footnote: Ibid., p. 214.}

Homer, then, describes armour later than that of the Mycenaean prime, when, as far as works of art show, only a huge leathern shield was carried, though the gold breastplates of the corpses in the grave suggest that corslets existed. Homer's men, on the other hand, have, at least in certain cases quoted above, large bronze-plated shields and bronze cuirasses of no great resisting power, perhaps in various stages of evolution, from the byrnie with scales or small plates of bronze to the breastplate and backplate, though the plates for breast and back certainly appear to be usually worn.

It seems that some critics cannot divest themselves of the idea that "the original poet" of the "kernel" was contemporary with them who slept in the shaft graves of Mycenae, covered with golden ornaments, and that for body armour he only knew their monstrous shields. Mr. Leaf writes: "The armour of Homeric heroes corresponds closely to that of the Mykenaean age as we learn it from the monuments. The heroes wore no breastplate; their only defensive armour was the enormous Mykenaean shield…"

This is only true if we excise all the passages which contradict the statement, and go on with Mr. Leaf to say, "by the seventh century B.C., or thereabouts, the idea of a panoply without a breastplate had become absurd. By that time the epic poems had almost ceased to grow; but they still admitted a few minor episodes in which the round shield" (where (?) "and corslet played a part, as well as the interpolation of a certain number of lines and couplets in which the new armament was mechanically introduced into narratives which originally knew nothing of it." {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. 568.}

On the other hand, Mr. Leaf says that "the small circular shield of later times is unknown to Homer," with "a very few curious exceptions," in which the shields are not said to be small or circular. {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p, 575.}

Surely this is rather arbitrary dealing! We start from our theory that the original poet described the armour of "the monuments" though they are "of the prime," while he professedly lived long after the prime – lived in an age when there must have been changes in military equipment. We then cut out, as of the seventh century, whatever passages do not suit our theory. Anybody can prove anything by this method. We might say that the siege scene on the Mycenaean silver vase represents the Mycenaean prime, and that, as there is but one jersey among eight men otherwise stark naked, we must cut out seven-eighths of the chitons in the Iliad, these having been interpolated by late poets who did not run about with nothing on. We might call the whole poem late, because the authors know nothing of the Mycenaean bathing-drawers so common on the "monuments." The argument compels Mr. Leaf to assume that a shield can be called {Greek: teuchea} in the plural, so, in Iliad, VII. 122, when the squires of Menelaus "take the {Greek: teuchea} from his shoulders," we are assured that "the shield (aspis) was for the chiefs alone" (we have seen that all the host of Pandarus wore shields), "for those who could keep a chariot to carry them, and squires to assist them in taking off this ponderous defence" (see VII 122). {Footnote: Iliad, vol. i. p. 583.}

We do "see VII. 122," and find that not a single shield, but pieces of gear in the plural number were taken off Menelaus. The feeblest warrior without any assistance could stoop his head and put it through the belt of his shield, as an angler takes off his fishing creel, and there he was, totally disarmed. No squire was needed to disarm him, any more than to disarm Girard in the Chancun de Willame. Nobody explains why a shield is spoken of as a number of things, in the plural, and that constantly, and in lines where, if the poet means a shield, prosody permits him to say a shield, {Greek: therapontes ap oopoon aspid elonto}.

It really does appear that Reichel's logic, his power of visualising simple things and processes, and his knowledge of the evolution of defensive armour everywhere, were not equal to his industry and classical erudition. Homer seems to describe what he saw: shields, often of great size, made of leather, plated with bronze, and suspended by belts; and, for body armour, feeble bronze corslets and zosters. There is nothing inconsistent in all this: there was no more reason why an Homeric warrior should not wear a corslet as well as a shield than there was reason why a mediaeval knight who carried a targe should not also wear a hauberk, or why an Iroquois with a shield should not also wear his cotton or wicker-work armour. Defensive gear kept pace with offensive weapons. A big leather shield could keep out stone-tipped arrows; but as bronze-tipped arrows came in and also heavy bronze-pointed spears, defensive armour was necessarily strengthened; the shield was plated with bronze, and, if it did not exist before, the bronze corslet was developed.

To keep out stone-tipped arrows was the business of the Mycenaean wooden or leather shield. "Bronze arrow-heads, so common in the Iliad, are never found," says Schuchardt, speaking of Schliemann's Mycenaean excavations. {Footnote: Schuchardt, p. 237.}

There was thus, as far as arrows went, no reason why Mycenaean shields should be plated with bronze. If the piece of wood in Grave V. was a shield, as seems probable, what has become of its bronze plates, if it had any? {Footnote: Schuchardt, p. 269} Gold ornaments, which could only belong to shields, {Footnote: Ibid., p. 237.} were found, but bronze shield plates never. The inference is certain. The Mycenaean shields of the prime were originally wooden or leather defences against stone-headed arrows. Homer's shields are bronze-plated shields to keep out bronze-headed or even, perhaps, iron-pointed arrows of primitive construction (IV. 123). Homer describes armour based on Mycenaean lines but developed and advanced as the means of attack improved.

Where everything is so natural it seems fantastic to explain the circumstances by the theory that poets in a late age sometimes did and sometimes did not interpolate the military gear of four centuries posterior to the things known by the original singer. These rhapsodists, we reiterate, are now said to be anxiously conservative of Mycenaean detail and even to be deeply learned archaeologists. {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. 629.} At other times they are said to introduce recklessly part of the military gear of their own age, the corslets, while sternly excluding the bucklers. All depends on what the theory of very late developments of the Epic may happen to demand at this or that moment.

Again, Mr. Leaf informs us that "the first rhapsodies were born in the bronze age, in the day of the ponderous Mycenaean shield; the last in the iron age, when men armed themselves with breastplate and light round buckler." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. x.} We cannot guess how he found these things out, for corslets are as common in one "rhapsody" as in another when circumstances call for the mention of corslets, and are entirely unnamed in the Odyssey (save that the Achaeans are "bronze-chitoned"), while the Odyssey is alleged to be much later than the Iliad. As for "the iron age," no "rhapsodist" introduces so much as one iron spear point. It is argued that he speaks of bronze in deference to tradition. Then why does he scout tradition in the matter of greaves and corslets, while he sometimes actually goes behind tradition to find Mycenaean things unknown to the original poets?

These theories appear too strangely inconsistent; really these theories cannot possibly be accepted. The late poets, of the theory, are in the iron age, and are, of course, familiar with iron weapons; yet, in conservative deference to tradition, they keep them absolutely out of their rhapsodies. They are equally familiar with bronze corslets, so, reckless this time of tradition, they thrust them even into rhapsodies which are centuries older than their own day. They are no less familiar with small bucklers, yet they say nothing about them and cling to the traditional body-covering shield. The source of the inconsistent theories which we have been examining is easily discovered. The scholars who hold these opinions see that several things in the Homeric picture of life are based on Mycenaean facts; for example, the size of the shields and their suspension by baldrics. But the scholars also do steadfastly believe, following the Wolfian tradition, that there could be no long epic in the early period. Therefore the greater part, much the greater part of the Iliad, must necessarily, they say, be the work of continuators through several centuries. Critics are fortified in this belief by the discovery of inconsistencies in the Epic, which, they assume, can only be explained as the result of a compilation of the patchwork of ages. But as, on this theory, many men in many lands and ages made the Epic, their contributions cannot but be marked by the inevitable changes in manners, customs, beliefs, implements, laws, weapons, and so on, which could not but arise in the long process of time. Yet traces of change in law, religion, manners, and customs are scarcely, if at all, to be detected; whence it logically follows that a dozen generations of irresponsible minstrels and vagrant reciters were learned, conscientious, and staunchly conservative of the archaic tone. Their erudite conservatism, for example, induced them, in deference to the traditions of the bronze age, to describe all weapons as of bronze, though many of the poets were living in an age of weapons of iron. It also prompted them to describe all shields as made on the far-away old Mycenaean model, though they were themselves used to small circular bucklers, with a bracer and a grip, worn on the left arm.

But at this point the learning and conservatism of the late poets deserted them, and into their new lays, also into the old lays, they eagerly introduced many unwarrantable corslets and greaves – things of the ninth to seventh centuries. We shall find Helbig stating, on the same page, that in the matter of usages "the epic poets shunned, as far as possible, all that was recent," and also that for fear of puzzling their military audiences they did the reverse: "they probably kept account of the arms and armour of their own day." {Footnote: La Question Mycénienne, p. 50. Cf. Note I.} Now the late poets, on this showing, must have puzzled warriors who used iron weapons by always speaking of bronze weapons. They pleased the critical warriors, on the other hand, by introducing the corslets and greaves which every military man of their late age possessed. But, again, the poets startled an audience which used light bucklers, worn on the left arm, by talking of enormous targes, slung round the neck.

All these inconsistencies of theory follow from the assumption that the Iliad must be a hotch-potch of many ages. If we assume that, on the whole, it is the work of one age, we see that the poet describes the usages which obtained in his own day. The dead are cremated, not, as in the Mycenaean prime, inhumed. The shield has been strengthened to meet bronze, not stone-tipped, arrows by bronze plates. Corslets and greaves have been elaborated. Bronze, however, is still the metal for swords and spears, and even occasionally for tools and implements, though these are often of iron. In short, we have in Homer a picture of a transitional age of culture; we have not a medley of old and new, of obsolete and modern. The poets do not describe inhumation, as they should do, if they are conservative archaeologists. In that case, though they burn, they would have made their heroes bury their dead, as they did at Mycenas. They do not introduce iron swords and spears, as they must do, if, being late poets, they keep in touch with the armament of their time. If they speak of huge shields only because they are conservative archaeologists, then, on the other hand, they speak of corslets and greaves because they are also reckless innovators.

They cannot be both at once. They are depicting a single age, a single "moment in culture." That age is certainly sundered from the Mycenaean prime by the century or two in which changing ideas led to the superseding of burial by burning, or it is sundered from the Mycenaean prime by a foreign conquest, a revolution, and the years in which the foreign conquerors acquired the language of their subjects.

In either alternative, and one or other must be actual, there was time enough for many changes in the culture of the Mycenaean prime to be evolved. These changes, we say, are represented by the descriptions of culture in the Iliad. That hypothesis explains, simply and readily, all the facts. The other hypothesis, that the Iliad was begun near the Mycenaean prime and was continued throughout four or five centuries, cannot, first, explain how the Iliad was composed, and, next, it wanders among apparent contradictories and through a maze of inconsistencies.

THE ZOSTER, ZOMA, AND MITRE

We are far from contending that it is always possible to understand Homer's descriptions of defensive armour. But as we have never seen the actual objects, perhaps the poet's phrases were clear enough to his audience and are only difficult to us. I do not, for example, profess to be sure of what happened when Pandarus shot at Menelaus. The arrow lighted "where the golden buckles of the zosterwere clasped, and the doubled breastplate met them. So the bitter arrow alighted upon the firm zoster; through the wrought zoster it sped, and through the curiously wrought breastplate it pressed on, and through the mitre he wore to shield his flesh, a barrier against darts; and this best shielded him, yet it passed on even through this," and grazed the hero's flesh (Iliad, IV. I 32 seq.). Menelaus next says that "the glistering zoster in front stayed the dart, and the zoma beneath, and the mitrê that the coppersmiths fashioned" (IV. 185-187). Then the surgeon, Machaon, "loosed the glistering zoster and the zoma, and the mitrê beneath that the coppersmiths fashioned" (IV. 215, 216).

Reading as a mere student of poetry I take this to mean that the corslet was of two pieces, fastening in the middle of the back and the middle of the front of a man (though Mr. Monro thinks that the plates met and the zoster was buckled at the side); that the zoster, a mailed belt, buckled just above the place where the plates of the corslet met; that the arrow went through the meeting-place of the belt buckles, through the place where the plates of the corslet met, and then through the mitrê, a piece of bronze armour worn under the corslet, though the nature of this mitrê and of the zoma I do not know. Was the mitrê a separate article or a continuation of the breastplate, lower down, struck by a dropping arrow?

In 1883 Mr. Leaf wrote: "I take it that the zoma means the waist of the cuirass which is covered by the zoster, and has the upper edge of the mitrê or plated apron beneath it fastened round the warrior's body. … This view is strongly supported by all the archaic vase paintings I have been able to find." {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic studies, vol. iv. pp. 74,75.} We see a "corslet with a projecting rim"; that rim is called zoma and holds the zoster. "The hips and upper part of the thighs were protected either by a belt of leather, sometimes plated, called the mitrê, or else only by the lower part of the chiton, and this corresponds exactly with Homeric description." {Footnote: Journal of Hellenic Studies, pp. 76, 77.}

At this time, in days before Reichel, Mr. Leaf believed in bronze corslets, whether of plates or plated jacks; he also believed, we have seen, that the huge shields, as of Aias, were survivals in poetry; that "Homer" saw small round bucklers in use, and supposed that the old warriors were muscular enough to wear circular shields as great as those in the vase of Aristonothos, already described. {Footnote: Ibid., vol. iv p. 285.}

On the corslet, as we have seen, Mr. Leaf now writes as a disciple of Reichel. But as to the mitrê, he rejects Helbig's and Mr. Ridgeway's opinion that it was a band of metal a foot wide in front and very narrow behind. Such things have been found in Euboea and in Italy. Mr. Ridgeway mentions examples from Bologna, Corneto, Este, Hallstatt, and Hungary. {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, p. 31 I.} The zoster is now, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, a "girdle" "holding up the waist-cloth (zoma), so characteristic of Mycenaean dress!" Reichel's arguments against corslets "militate just as strongly against the presence of such a mitrê, which is, in fact, just the lower half of a corslet… The conclusion is that the metallic mitrê is just as much an intruder into the armament of the Epos as the corslet." The process of evolution was, Mr. Leaf suggests, first, the abandonment of the huge shield, with the introduction of small round bucklers in its place. Then, second, a man naturally felt very unprotected, and put on "the metallic mitrê" of Helbig (which covered a foot of him in front and three inches behind). "Only as technical skill improved could the final stage, that of the elaborate cuirass, be attained."

This appears to us an improbable sequence of processes. While arrows were flying thick, as they do fly in the Iliad, men would not reject body-covering shields for small bucklers while they were still wholly destitute of body armour. Nor would men arm only their stomachs when, if they had skill enough to make a metallic mitrê, they could not have been so unskilled as to be unable to make corslets of some more or less serviceable type. Probably they began with huge shields, added the linothorex (like the Iroquois cotton thorex), and next, as a rule, superseded that with the bronze thorex, while retaining the huge shield, because the bronze thorex was so inadequate to its purpose of defence. Then, when archery ceased to be of so much importance as coming to the shock with heavy spears, and as the bronze thorex really could sometimes keep out an arrow, they reduced the size of their shields, and retained surface enough for parrying spears and meeting point and edge of the sword. That appears to be a natural set of sequences, but I cannot pretend to guess how the corslet fastened or what the mitrê and zoster really were, beyond being guards of the stomach and lower part of the trunk.

HELMETS, GREAVES, SPEARS

No helmets of metal, such as Homer mentions, have been found in Mycenaean graves. A quantity of boars' teeth, sixty in all, were discovered in Grave V. and may have adorned and strengthened leather caps, now mouldered into dust. An ivory head from Mycenae shows a conical cap set with what may be boars' tusks, with a band of the same round the chin, and an earpiece which was perhaps of bronze? Spata and the graves of the lower town of Mycenae and the Enkomi ivories show similar headgear. {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, pp. 196, 197.}

This kind of cap set with boars' tusks is described in Iliad, Book X., in the account of the hasty arraying of two spies in the night of terror after the defeat and retreat to the ships. The Trojan spy, Dolon, also wears a leather cap. The three spies put on no corslets, as far as we can affirm, their object being to remain inconspicuous and unburdened with glittering bronze greaves and corslets. The Trojan camp was brilliantly lit up with fires, and there may have been a moon, so the less bronze the better. In these circumstances alone the heroes of the Iliad are unequipped, certainly, with bronze helmets, corslets, and bronze greaves. {Dislocated Footnote: Evans, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxx. pp. 209-215.} {Footnote: Iliad, X. 255-265.}

The author of Book X. is now regarded as a precise archaeologist, who knew that corslets and bronze helmets were not used in Agamemnon's time, but that leather caps with boars' tusks were in fashion; while again, as we shall see, he is said to know nothing about heroic costume (cf. The Doloneia). As a fact, he has to describe an incident which occurs nowhere else in Homer, though it may often have occurred in practice – a hurried council during a demoralised night, and the hasty arraying of two spies, who wish to be lightfooted and inconspicuous. The author's evidence as to the leather cap and its garnishing of boars' tusks testifies to a survival of such gear in an age of bronze battle-helmets, not to his own minute antiquarian research.