The general conclusion seems to be that there was, in men's dress and armour, a break of several centuries during which un-Homeric costume and armour existed, and that—about the time just preceding the Persian wars and later—Greece reverted to the Homeric types or men's dress and body armour, while the Homeric shield was never revived. It was invented as an umbrella against arrows in far off days, when the bow, rather than the spear, was the chief weapon of attack, when arrow-heads were of stone; and it went out when glory was only to be won at close quarters.
Why the plain plate corslet tended to go out, about the time of the Persian war, while the flimsy but highly decorated mail hauberk came in, a mere jascran, it is not easy to conjecture; but probably the hauberk was adapted from Assyrian and Egyptian armour of the period. The jaseran went out again, and the plate corslets of our Museums came in again, in the fifth to fourth centuries.
Fig. 7.—Lady Pouring out Wine for Warrior
R. F. Vase-Painting by Duris, in Vienna
It is manifestly open to critics to argue that Homeric armour never existed, in Greece, before the sixth to fifth centuries, and that it was then interpolated into the Epics. But if they say this, must they not apply the same argument to Homeric costume, loose and free flowing? Was that attire also interpolated into the poems at the date when it first appears in art? Or are we to say that the artists who represent it were "archaising," were making a guess at what the costume of the heroic age might have been?
This cannot be, for the dress is the historic Greek costume which they then wore. As Panathenaic vases maintained archaic costume long out of date, I have not appealed to their evidence as to costume and armour, but have relied on other vases,—on a vase from Sparta with warriors rendered in relief,[35] on a gem cited, on a remarkable bronze in the British Museum of a mounted man, and so forth.[36]
I cannot say that Homer always has hauberks, not corslets of back-plate and breast-plate in his mind. The two passages in which the front gualon is pierced over the belly, look as if Homer knew both corslet and hauberk. On the other hand, the epithets of the corslet commonly used, ποικίλος, παναίολος, πολυδαίδαλος, suit the hauberk, not the plain back-plate and breast-plate, as may be seen by looking at both kinds of armour as illustrated on countless vases, while the zoster and mitrê are common in Homer, and were never worn, as far as art shows, with the Ionian back-plate and breast-plate, though they both appear with the plate cuirass on the seal impressions of Haghia Triada.