[15] I have seen another archaic bronze plate corslet, with engraved designs, but do not know where it now is.
[16] See Note to this chapter, "Shield and Body Armour."
[17] R. G. E. p. 143.
[18] Iliad, vol. i. p. 576.
[19] Ibid. vii. 206-209. Mr. Leaf's translation, 1906, p. 134.
[20] Iliad, iii. 114, 115.
[21] iii. 134, 135.
[22] Against this opinion may be cited Odyssey, xxii. 108-114, where the only protective armour used by the men of Odysseus is helmets and shields, yet the formulae of "doing on bronze over the flesh," and "donning the fair pieces of armour" are employed. To myself it may seem that these are epic formulae which arose in a period of corslets but are used where no corslets were being worn, in the fight with the Wooers. Mr. Murray, however, takes the absence of specific mention of corslets in the Odyssey generally as a proof of his theory that "the Odyssey has been altogether less worked over, expurgated, and modernised than what books still persist in calling without qualification 'the older poem'" (R. G. E. pp. 145, 146). Here he has to discover why the Odyssey, according to critics, has (in his view) been "worked over and modernised" as regards the house and the bride-price, while in a few fighting passages the warriors are left in the supposed state of Aegean nakedness, save for the shield, which, unlike Mycenaean shields, has a bronze plating, as in the Iliad. Mr. Murray (R. G. E. p. 137, note 1) grants that armour of bronze "may have been, in some elements, a revival of something long forgotten...." but was still unaware that the seals of Haghia Triada represent a man in a cuirass of plate, a thick belt of plate, and a mailed kirtle.
[23] Homer and the Iliad, p. 212.
[24] Monumenti Antichi, vol. xiii., 1903, pp. 42, 114.