Fig. 5—Menelaus and Hector fighting over Euphorbus
Vase-painting from Camirus, Rhodes
So much for these black figure vases. The older they are, the more they favour the plain plate corslet fastened at the sides, and the cypassis; and the less they favour the decorated hauberk, mailed kirtle, and free flowing chiton. But the two styles overlap.
In the later red figure vases, the plain corslet sometimes occurs, but the vast majority show the flowing chiton, under the richly variegated hauberk of mail, clasping in front, and having broad shoulder plates coming over from behind and fastened in front; with the plated flaps, and below them the flowing chiton, as a general rule. It is this later style, or something very like it, that Homer usually describes.
If the armour was written into the poem late, if in the earliest lays the men wore no armour but the shield, the change to hauberk, zoster, and plated flaps was made by late poets about the end of the sixth century or the beginning of the fifth, but the old huge shield with baldric was left unchanged. Meanwhile, as the tight cypassis scarcely reaching below the buttocks is the usual warrior's costume of the seventh to early or mid-sixth century, the loose chiton, like the variegated hauberk,—the chiton being "a loosely fitting garment, reaching apparently as low as the knees, but gathered up into the belt for active exertion,"[30]—must also have been interpolated into the poems about the middle of the sixth century, when the cypassis was beginning to go out of favour.
It is strange that these facts—the seventh century armour and costume are un-Homeric (though we cannot prove that Homer knew only the hauberk clasped in front), the sixth to fifth century armour and costume answer closely to Homeric descriptions—have not been observed either by Reichel or his English following. Nor do they notice that the thigh pieces of seventh to sixth century art never occur in Homer, as, on the Reichelian theory, they ought to do; practical warriors would expect to hear of them from the late minstrels. We now prove Homer's knowledge of the hauberk, clasped at front and back.
There is a passage in the Iliad (iv. 132-140) which vexes critics; we give it in Mr. Leaf's translation. To ruin the Trojans, Athene makes Pandarus break the oath of truce, and shoot at Menelaus. She then guides the arrow so that it may merely draw blood. "Her own hand guided it where the golden buckles of the belt were clasped and the doubled breast-plate met them. So the bitter arrow lighted (ἔπεσε) upon the firm belt; through the inwrought (δαιδαλέοιο) belt it sped, and through the curiously wrought breast-plate it pressed on, and through the taslet"[31] (μίτρη, plated kirtle) "he wore to shield his flesh, a barrier against darts; and this best shielded him, yet it passed on even through this," and drew blood.