We have some red figure vases with the plain plate corslet, and some black figure vases with the decorated corslet or rather hauberk of scales, and mailed flaps; but the set of fashion is away from the plain plate corslet fastened at the sides, to the decorative hauberk of scale-mail, fastening in front,—Homer's type of corslet (at least in some cases), and the corslet of two very early Tirynthian vases.
As far as we can trust such crude art[12] (fig. 3), the Tirynthian body-covering was a jack or jaseran of rings or scales, probably fastened on leather, not the back-plate and breast-plate of the eighth to early sixth centuries. Why, before the Persian war, Greek warriors adopted the hauberk of scale-armour in place of the back-plate and breast-plate, is unknown; probably it was borrowed from the late Assyrian hauberk of scales, of which many examples occur in Layard's Monuments. Judging from the later black figure vases, the process was gradual; some warriors wear the old back-plate, breast-plate, and jutting rim of metal; some the scaled hauberk, shoulder pieces, and plated πτέρυγες, or flaps, with or without the bronze girdle or zoster of Homer. A number of the scales, iron or bronze, of the hauberks have been found in the palace of the Egyptian king Apries, of the first part of the sixth century.
In archaic art, and in early sixth century black figure vases, the warrior wears the tight, un-Homeric, cypassis under his corslet. In later black figure vases, he wears the fluttering tails of his flowing Homeric chiton under his mailed kirtle. Thus the dress of men, in Homer, and the armour, in cases to be proved, are like those of the later sixth and early fifth centuries, rather than of the eighth to early sixth centuries.
Yet modern criticism, while it finds no fault with the sixth to fifth century costume of Homer's men, excises their sixth century hauberks, clasping down the middle, their zoster, or mailed girdle, their mitre, which served the purpose of the sixth to fifth century mailed flaps or mailed kirtle, and their greaves, as Ionian interpolations of the seventh century. We shall show that the back-plate and breast-plate of the seventh century are not the hauberk, clasping down the middle, of some passages in Homer; and that the jutting bronze rim of the seventh century is not the mitrê of Homer. Thus, if there were late interpolations of armour into Homer, they cannot have been made, as Reichel thought, in the seventh century, but very late, say 540-470 B.C., when armour shifted from bronze back-plate, breast-plate, and rim, to scaled hauberk, shoulder pieces, zoster, and metal plated flaps, equivalent in protective purpose to the mitrê.
The modern theory that Homeric armour is of the seventh century, which it demonstrably is not, starts from the late Dr. Reichel's essay on Homeric armour.[13] Reichel built on very slender and sandy foundations. He supposed that in the oldest parts of the Epics men fought in battle as six or seven men, in Aegean art, fight in chance encounters (that is, almost naked, or with shields which conceal the body, also taken for granted as naked). He did not know the proof of the existence of Aegean body armour, which we shall cite, and he really evolved things "out of his inner consciousness."
Reichel, we must add, could not argue securely from the absence of actual corslets in grave-furniture of the Aegean age. Though hauberks occur constantly in the art, they are not found in the graves of the sixth to fifth centuries, in Greece; and even plate corslets are extremely rare. In Reichel's second edition, which he, unfortunately, left incomplete at his regretted death, "he contemplated an important change of ground.... He regards the thin gold plates found on the breasts of the skeletons at Mykene as possibly the funereal representatives of metal sewn on to the chiton, and thus forming a prae-Ionic corslet."[14]
Had he lived, he would have seen an undeniable "prae-Ionic corslet," no hauberk but a cuirass of plate, on the Minoan seal impressions of Haghia Triada.
But the evidence for the non-existence of prae-Ionic corslets based on their absence from tombs, even if it were absolute, which it is not, would have been of little avail. How many Ionic plate corslets are in actual existence, to our knowledge? Only fragments of one, as far as I am aware, and that one is not "Ionic," it was found at Olympia, and is "archaic." The fragments are of bronze plate, with decorations in the archaic style, figures of men and women in archaic costume.[15] Thus the non-existence of objects represented often in the art of remote ages cannot be demonstrated by our failure to discover specimens of them.