(6) Mr. Monro renders the speech of Melanthius (xxii. 139-141) in this manner: "Go to, I will bring you gear to arm you from the store-chamber, for the arms are in their place (ἔνδον), I think, and Odysseus and his sons have not put them elsewhere." Melanthius merely means that the armour has not been moved by Odysseus and Telemachus from its natural place, the store-chamber; he will there find what is needed.
(7) The passage in Book xxiv. 164-166, where the ghost of Amphimedon tells the story of the removal of the arms to Agamemnon in Hades, is late, like all Book xxiv. It is possibly later than the passage about removing the arms from the hall.
Averse as I am to theories of interpolation, the whole passage in which "iron" is made a synonym for "weapon" is rich in the non-Epic manner as well as matter, and causes very un-Homeric confusions. Critics of all shades of opinion recognise this, and I do not object to the line about iron merely because it is as fatal to my theory as it is friendly to that of Mr. Ridgeway.[18]
In this case the line contradicts the whole of both Epics, which in itself provokes suspicion; just as a single passage in which cavalry were introduced, or burials by humation were introduced, or armorial bearings on small bucklers appeared, would rightly be deemed a late interpolation.
This line apart, the two Epics seem uniform work of a peculiar stage, the Gezer stage, of the overlap of bronze and iron.
Hesiod knew all about the Bronze Age, and knew that his was the age of iron, whereas the ancients tooled with bronze, "and there was no black iron." Put Hesiod at 700 B.C., and we wonder why "late poets" about that date gave iron tools but bronze weapons to the Achaeans.[19]
The line in the Odyssey is found, one must add, in most suspicious circumstances, and in the worst of company. It first appears in Odyssey, xvi. 294, when Odysseus, at the house of Eumaeus, is prophesying to Telemachus about the misbehaviour of the Wooers. He bids his son, at his nod, to conceal the arms and the weapons in the hall, and if asked why he has done so, reply that they afford occasion for brawls, as "iron draws a man to him." The passage goes on, "but for us alone leave two swords, two spears, and two shields to grasp with our hands" Here the word for shields is βοάγρια, which occurs in no other line of Iliad or Odyssey except Iliad, xii. 22; while the following line (23), mentioning "demigods," "takes us at once away from the Homeric world, and opens an entirely new order of conceptions."[20] "The most careless critics," says Mr. Leaf, cannot pass this passage in the Iliad, nor can the most conservative critic defend it. As the dubious passage of the Odyssey concerning iron contains the same non-Homeric word for shields as the indubitably false passage of the Iliad, and as the poet of the Odyssey expects the shields to be held in the hand (an die Arme zu nehmen, Faesi) while Homer's shields are always suspended by baldrics, it is clear that the Odyssean passage with the mention of iron as synonymous with weapon is rather more than suspect.
The line recurs[21] in changed circumstances when Telemachus and Odysseus together remove the weapons, but do not leave two swords, two spears, and two shields (βοάγρια) for themselves. Everything falls out otherwise than Odysseus had practically prophesied in Book xvi., when we come to the slaying of the Wooers in Book xxii.
This would mean nothing in a modern novel; but, as Mr. Monro says, in Homer it is singular; it would be more in his manner to let events exactly fulfil the boding of Odysseus. I have proved that the whole passage not only contradicts the uniform tenor of the two Epics as to bronze weapons, but causes hopeless confusion, has the most suspicious associations, and contravenes the Homeric practice of suspending shields by baldrics. Even if we excised the line concerning iron, which can be omitted without injuring the sense, the whole passage in both of its appearances is decidedly suspicious.[22]