Reichel proceeds from the imaginary postulate that a man who has a body-covering shield dispenses with body armour. As a matter of historical fact he often does not.[16] Next, the Aegean shield, being heavy, made chariots necessary. (But chariots have been used in war by races with small shields, and the great shield is worn by Aias and Odysseus who had no chariots.) Next, says Reichel, parrying bucklers coming in as early as the archaic art (say 700-620 B.C.), big shields went out, and for protection the corslet, metal girdle, and mitrê, a mailed kirtle, were adopted about 700 B.C. As it was now ridiculous, says Reichel, to think of a man fighting only in his shirt, late poets introduced body armour into old portions of the Iliad, made when body armour was unknown.
Of course, by parity of reasoning, the new poets ought also to have got rid of chariots, bronze weapons, cairn-burial, the bride-price, Homeric chitons, and so forth, all of them obsolete or little used things in the age (700-600 B.C.) of corslets, greaves, and body armour. Their warriors should also have worn the contemporary tight fleshings, with the cypassis, and parameridia, cuisses, tight thigh pieces (the "taslets" of 1640 A.D.). That did not happen; Homer knows no thigh pieces or parameridia, so common in Greek armour of the sixth century; but, says Mr. Murray, "all the heroes were summarily provided with breast-plates, θώρηκες."[17] Mr. Leaf, on the other hand, denies this; "the corslet is given to some only, and that in the most capricious fashion."[18]
Mr. Leaf's contention (Mr. Murray's is an obiter dictum) rests on the postulate that, when the corslet is not explicitly named in connection with a hero, he has no corslet; he has only a shield. If so, why are his "pieces of armour" (τέυχεα), whether he is putting them on or off, whether he is being stripped of them or is stripping others, always called τέυχεα in the plural? Aias is not explicitly said to have a corslet, but the space of time occupied by his arming he asks the Achaeans to devote to prayer to Zeus. "So said they, while Aias arrayed him in flashing bronze. And when he had now clothed upon his flesh all his armour...."[19] The time required, and the phrase "all his armour" which "clothes his flesh," cannot possibly apply to slinging on or off a shield, and donning or doffing a helmet, the work of five seconds. The sword was always worn, in peace and in war.
This is so certain that we waste no more space over the matter. All the gentry wear τέυχεα, "pieces of armour," which they all take off and lay on the ground while they watch a duel, and which they always, when they can, strip from a fallen foe. Thus, before the duel between Paris and Menelaus, the men-at-arms dismount, take off their armour, and lay it on the ground.[20] They themselves "are leaning on their great shields," which are not their armour.[21] This use of τέυχεα is universal in Homer, and so, for men-at-arms, is the possession of body armour.[22]
The difficulties which critics find in the details and mechanism of the armour cannot be impossibilities, for the "later poets" were familiar with corslets, and would not write nonsense about them. The opposing theory is that Ionian minstrels introduced the corslet of their own age, seventh century, (corslets not uniformly to be found in Homer), to satisfy the practical warriors who wore it. Yet, in doing so, the poets made incoherent nonsense. As Miss Stawell writes, "a warlike audience, versed in the use of the corslet, insisted on its introduction in the poems,—and yet never objected to the absurdities it introduced,—such a theory cannot bear thinking out."[23] When we came to discuss Homeric tactics, we found precisely the same objection to the German theories; they represent the poets as pleasing military experts by writing nonsense.
The body armour is thus an integral part of the poem. The word θωρήσσεσθαι, to put on the thorex or breast covering, is constantly employed in the general sense of arming, both in Iliad and Odyssey, though in the latter no corslet is specifically named. It would have been as easy to coin a verb for arming from ἀσπίς, the shield, in an age when shields were the only armour. That θώρηξ should ever have been a term for the shield seems to me incredible.
The corslet has many epithets, expressing the elaborateness of its decoration, such as ποικίλος, παναίολος, πολυδαίδαλος; and no such words apply to the plain metal plates of corslets in archaic Greek art of the eighth to early sixth centuries, as shown in art. At most they were etched with designs of men and women, as in the example from Olympia, or have two volutes. The corslet was made of γύαλα whatever they may have precisely been, for sometimes the epithets applied to the Homeric corslet do not suit plate but mailed armour.
