Homer and His Age

by Andrew Lang

It is a strong point with Mr. Leaf that "we never hear of the corslet in the case of Aias...." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, vol. i. p. 576.} Robert, however, like ourselves, detects the corslet among "al the {Greek: teuchea}" which Aias puts on for his duel with Hector (Iliad, VII. 193, 206-207).

In the same Book (VII. 101-103, 122) the same difficulty occurs. Menelaus offers to fight Hector, and says, "I will put on my harness" {Greek: thooraxomai}, and does "put on his fair pieces of armour" {Greek: teuchea kala}, Agamemnon forbids him to fight, and his friends "joyfully take his pieces of armour" {Greek: teuchea} "from his shoulders" (Iliad, VII. 206-207). They take off pieces of armour, in the plural, and a shield cannot be spoken of in the plural; while the sword would not be taken off—it was worn even in peaceful costume.

Idomeneus is never named as wearing a corslet, but he remarks that he has plenty of corslets (XIII. 264); and in this and many cases opponents of corslets prove their case by cutting out the lines which disprove it. Anything may be demonstrated if we may excise whatever passage does not suit our hypothesis. It is impossible to argue against this logical device, especially when the critic, not satisfied with a clean cut, supposes that some late enthusiast for corslets altered the prayer of Thetis to Hephaestus for the very purpose of dragging in a corslet. {Footnote: Leaf, Note to Iliad, xviii. 460, 461.} If there is no objection to a line except that a corslet occurs in it, where is the logic in excising the line because one happens to think that corslets are later than the oldest parts of the Iliad?

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.}