Homer and His Age

by Andrew Lang

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.}