[356]. Iliad, vi. 235.
Iron has no decorative function in the Homeric Poems. It contributes nothing to the polymetallic splendours of the palaces of Menelaus and Alcinous, of the Shield of Achilles, or of the Breastplate of Agamemnon. Except where it furnishes an axletree for the chariot of Heré, it is never employed in purposeful combination with any other substance. Esteem, rather than admiration, seems, in fact, to be considered its due. Its colour is described, usually as grey, sometimes as violet; and the distinction may possibly, as has been supposed,[[357]] mark the observed difference between the hoary appearance of newly fractured iron, and the bluish gleam of steel blades. Nevertheless, an arbitrary element in Homeric tints has often to be admitted. Iron is, however, chiefly characterised in the Iliad and Odyssey—and with indisputable justice—as ‘hard to work.’ It demands, indeed, far more strenuous treatment than its ancient rival, copper; and the difficulties connected with its production and working long retarded the prevalence of its use. Metallurgy advanced but slowly to the point of being dominated by its influence.
[357]. Buchholz, Homer. Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 335.
This was probably first reached in Mesopotamia. Some Chaldean graves have been found to contain immense quantities of iron, of the best quality, and wrought with the finest skill.[[358]] One, opened by Place at Khorsabad, was a veritable magazine of chains and implements, still recognisable, though of course partly devoured by rust. They dated from about the eighth century B.C.; but the metal had been in some degree available for ages previously. In Egypt, although men (iron) may have been known under the early Memphite dynasties, the nature of the hieroglyph employed to denote it proves that copper had the precedence. Utensils of iron were enumerated among the spoils of Thothmes III., in the seventeenth century, B.C.;[[359]] barzel has a place in the Books of Moses, and was wrought at Tyre in the days of king Hiram, and no doubt indefinitely earlier. The Latin ferrum, indeed (equivalent to the Semitic barezum) testifies, it is held, to the Phœnician introduction of the metal to Italy in the twelfth century, B.C.[[360]]
[358]. Perrot et Chipiez, Hist. de l’Art dans l’Antiquité, t. ii. p. 720.
[359]. Lepsius, Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes, p. missing page See this [transcriber note].
[360]. Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 145.
Its still earlier diffusion through Greece is only, then, what might have been expected: and the complete acquaintance with it manifested in the Homeric poems conveys, in itself, no presumption of lateness in their origin. But there are archæological difficulties. Prehistoric iron is unaccountably scarce in the neighbourhood of the Ægean. True, it is of a perishable nature; but where not even a ferruginous stain survives, it is difficult to believe that objects made out of iron once existed. Until lately, iron was believed to be entirely absent from the ruins both at Hissarlik and Mycenæ, as well as from those of Orchomenos and Tiryns. But in 1890, Dr. Schliemann, in clearing the foundations of a building on the Trojan Pergamus, came upon two lumps of the missing substance; and some finger-rings composed of it are among the trophies of the recent excavations carried on in the lower city of Mycenæ, under the auspices of the Greek Archæological Society.[[361]] But the metal was then evidently very rare, although the ‘bee-hive tombs,’ where it was discovered, belong to a later stage of Mycenæan history than the ‘shaft-graves’ of the citadel. Still, the gap previously supposed to divide, at this point, the Homeric from the Mycenæan world, has to a certain extent been bridged; and other discrepancies may, in like manner, be qualified, if not removed, by further research.
[361]. Schuchhardt, op. cit. pp. 332, 296.
The metals chiefly employed in Homeric verse to typify abstract qualities are bronze and iron. The Shakespearian use of ‘golden’ to convey delightfulness of almost any kind, as in the expressions ‘golden cadence of poesy,’ ‘a golden mind,’ ‘golden joys,’ ‘golden sleep,’ and so on, is paralleled only by the Homeric ‘golden Aphrodite.’ Lead does not exemplify, with the Greek poet, heaviness and sloth, nor silver the gentle ripple of sweet sounds. But death, as ‘a sleep of bronze,’ comes before us in all its unrelenting sternness; Stentor has a ‘voice of bronze;’ a ‘memory of bronze’ was needed for exceptional feats of recitation; and the ‘iron noise’ of battle went up to a ‘bronzen sky’ during the struggle ensuing upon the fall of Patroclus. In the Odyssey, the sky is alternately of bronze and of iron, the same idea of stability—of a ‘brave, o’erhanging firmament’ being conveyed by both epithets.[[362]] Moreover, iron is there the recognised symbol of pitilessness, strength of mind, and self-command. Odysseus listens, masked in an ‘aspect of iron,’ while Penelope, strangely touched by his still unrecognised presence, recites the weary story of her sorrows. A heart steeled—as we should say—against pity was said to be ‘of iron,’ as was that of Achilles against Hector in the days of his ‘iron indignation’ at the slaying of his loved comrade; and silence and secrecy, even in a woman, were represented by the rigidity of that unbending metal. Such metaphors occur, it is true, more frequently in the Odyssey than in the Iliad; but the conception upon which they are founded is present throughout the whole sphere of Homeric thought. There are, nevertheless, as we have seen, clearly definable differences, in the matter of metallic acquisitions, between the two great Epics. The Iliad knows six, while the Odyssey refers only to four of these substances, tin and lead not chancing to be noticed in its cantos; and iron, in their record, has made a considerable advance upon its Iliadic status. This is unquestionably a circumstance to be taken into account in attempting to deal with the Homeric problem.