Homer and His Age

by Andrew Lang

CHAPTER VII

HOMERIC ARMOUR

Tested by their ideas, their picture of political society, and their descriptions of burial rites, the presumed authors of the alleged expansions of the Iliad all lived in one and the same period of culture. But, according to the prevalent critical theory, we read in the Iliad not only large "expansions" of many dates, but also briefer interpolations inserted by the strolling reciters or rhapsodists. "Until the final literary redaction had come," says Mr. Leaf—that is about 540 B.C.—"we cannot feel sure that any details, even of the oldest work, were secure from the touch of the latest poet." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. ii. p. ix.}

Here we are far from Mr. Leaf's own opinion that "the whole scenery of the poems, the details of armour, palaces, dress, decoration ... had become stereotyped, and formed a foundation which the Epic poet dared not intentionally sap...." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. xv.} We now find {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. ix.} that "the latest poet" saps as much as he pleases down to the middle of the sixth century B.C. Moreover, in the middle of the sixth century B.C., the supposed editor employed by Hsistratus made "constant additions of transitional passages," and added many speeches by Nestor, an ancestor of Pisistratus.

Did these very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the unus color? We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, and Reichel and his followers. {Footnote: Homerische Waffen. Von Wolfgang Reichel. Wien, 1901.}

Reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no defensive armour except the great Mycenaean shields; that the ponderous shield made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the Mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy shield; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century B.C., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old.

How the new poets could conceive of warriors as always in chariots, whereas in practice they knew no war chariots, and yet could not conceive of them without corslets which the original poet never saw, is Reichel's secret. The new poets had in the old lays a plain example to follow. They did follow it as to chariots and shields; as to corslets and greaves they reversed it. Such is the Reichelian theory.

THE SHIELD

As regards armour, controversy is waged over the shield, corslet, and bronze greaves. In Homer the shield is of leather, plated with bronze, and of bronze is the corslet. No shields of bronze plating and no bronze corslets have been found in Mycenaean excavations.

We have to ask, do the Homeric descriptions of shields tally with the representations of shields in works of art, discovered in the graves of Mycenae, Spata in Attica, Vaphio in Sparta, and elsewhere? If the descriptions in Homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused by late rhapsodists in the Iron Age, who keep the great obsolete shields and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day, say 800-600 B.C.—gear unknown to the early singers?