It appears, then, that the monstrous Mycenaean shield is a survival of an age when bows and arrows played the same great part as they did in the wars of the Algonquins and Iroquois. The celebrated picture of a siege on a silver vase, of which fragments were found in Grave IV., shows archers skirmishing; there is an archer in the lion hunt on the dagger blade; thirty-five obsidian arrow-heads were discovered in Grave IV., while "in the upper strata of Mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze, though instances of obsidian still occur." In 1895 Dr. Tsountas found twenty arrow-heads of bronze, ten in each bundle, in a Mycenaean chamber tomb. Messrs. Tsountas and Manatt say, "In the Acropolis graves at Mycenae... the spear-heads were but few... arrow-heads, on the contrary, are comparatively abundant." They infer that "picked men used shield and spear; the rank and file doubtless fought simply with bow and sling." {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, zog. {sic}}. The great Mycenaean shield was obviously evolved as a defence against arrows and sling-stones flying too freely to be parried with a small buckler. What other purpose could it have served? But other defensive armour was needed, and was evolved, by Homer's men, as also, we shall see, by the Algonquins and Iroquois. The Algonquins and Iroquois thus prove that men who thought their huge shields very efficient, yet felt the desirableness of the protection afforded by corslets, for they wore, in addition to their shields, such corslets as they were able to manufacture, made of cotton, and corresponding to the Homeric {Greek: linothoraex}. {Footnote: In the interior of some shields, perhaps of all, were two {Greek: kanones} (VIII 193; XIII. 407). These have been understood as meaning a brace through which the left arm went, and another brace which the left hand grasped. Herodotus says that the Carians first used shield grips, and that previously shields were suspended by belts from the neck and left shoulder (Herodotus, i. 171). It would be interesting to know how he learned these facts-perhaps from Homer; but certainly the Homeric shield is often described as suspended by a belt. Mr. Leaf used to explain the {Greek: kanones} (XIII. 407) as "serving to attach the two ends of the baldrick to the shield" (Hellenic Society's Journal, iv. 291), as does Mr. Ridgeway. But now he thinks that they were two pieces of wood, crossing each other, and making the framework on which the leather of the shield was stretched. The hero could grasp the cross-bar, at the centre of gravity, in his left hand, rest the lower rim of the shield on the ground, and crouch behind it (XI. 593; XIII 157). In neither passage cited is anything said about resting the lower rim "on the ground," and in the second passage the warrior is actually advancing. In this attitude, however-grounding the lower rim of the great body-covering shield, and crouching behind it—we see Algonquin warriors of about 1610 in Champlain's drawings of Red Indian warfare.}
Mr. Leaf, indeed, when reviewing Reichel, says that "the use of the Mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; 'the shield' covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." {Footnote: Classical Review, ix. p. 55. 1895.}
But the Algonquins and Iroquois wore such breastplates as they could manufacture, though they also used shields of great size, suspended, in Mycenaean fashion, from the neck and shoulder by a telamon or belt. The knights of the eleventh century A.D., in addition to very large shields, wore ponderous hauberks or byrnies, as we shall prove presently. As this combination of great shield with corslet was common and natural, we cannot agree with Mr. Leaf when he says, "it follows that the Homeric warriors wore no metal breastplate, and that all the passages where the {Greek: thoraes} is mentioned are either later interpolations or refer to some other sort of armour," which, ex hypothesi, would itself be superfluous, given the body-covering shield.
Shields never make corslets superfluous when men can manufacture corslets.
The facts speak for themselves: the largest shields are not exclusive, so to speak, of corslets; the Homeric warriors used both, just as did Red Indians and the mediaeval chivalry of Europe. The use of the aspis in Homer, therefore, throws no suspicion on the concomitant use of the corslet. The really surprising fact would be if late poets, who knew only small round bucklers, never introduced them into the poems, but always spoke of enormous shields, while they at the same time did introduce corslets, unknown to the early poems which they continued. Clearly Reichel's theory is ill inspired and inconsistent. This becomes plain as soon as we trace the evolution of shields and corslets in ages when the bow played a great part in war. The Homeric bronze-plated shield and bronze corslet are defences of a given moment in military evolution; they are improvements on the large leather shield of Mycenaean art, but, as the arrows still fly in clouds, the time for the small parrying buckler has not yet come.
By the age of the Dipylon vases with human figures, the shield had been developed into forms unknown to Homer. In Fig. 3 (p. 131) we see one warrior with a fantastic shield, slim at the waist, with horns, as it were, above and below; the greater part of the shield is expended uselessly, covering nothing in particular. In form this targe seems to be a burlesque parody of the figure of a Mycenaean shield. The next man has a short oblong shield, rather broad for its length—perhaps a reduction of the Mycenaean door-shaped shield. The third warrior has a round buckler. All these shields are manifestly post-Homeric; the first type is the most common in the Dipylon art; the third survived in the eighth-century buckler.
{Illustration: FIG. 9.-GOLD CORSLET}