For a considerable time after the Homeric period bronze remained in use for offensive weapons, especially for those intended for piercing rather than cutting, such as spears, lances, and arrows, as well as for those which were merely defensive, such as shields, cuirasses, helmets, and greaves. Even swords were also sometimes of bronze, or at all events the tradition of their use was preserved by the poets. Thus we find Euripides[66] speaking of the bronze-speared Trojans, χαλκεγχέων Τρώων, and Virgil[67] describing the glitter of the bronze swords of some of the host of Turnus.
Probably, however, the use of the word χαλκὸς was not restricted to copper or bronze, but also came in time to mean metal in general, and thus extended to iron, a worker in which metal was, as we have already seen, termed a χαλκεύς.
The succession of iron to bronze is fully recognised by both Greek and Latin authors. The passage in Hesiod,[68] where he speaks of the third generation of men who had arms of bronze and houses of bronze, who ploughed with bronze, for the black iron did not exist, is already hackneyed; nor is the record of Lucretius[69] less well known:—
“Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt,
Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, ...
Posterius ferri vis est, ærisque reperta,
Sed prior æris erat quam ferri cognitus usus; ...
Inde minutatim processit ferreus ensis,
Versaque in opprobrium species est falcis ahenæ,
Et ferro cœpere solum proscindere terræ.”
The difference between the age of Homer and Hesiod in respect to the use of metals is well described by Mr. Gladstone. The former[70] “lived at a time when the use of iron (in Greece) was just commencing, when the commodity was rare, and when its value was very great;” but in the days of Hesiod “iron, as compared with copper, had come to be the inferior, that is to say the cheaper metal,” and the poet “looks back from his iron age with an admiring envy on the heroic period.”
Hesiod gives to Hercules[71] a helmet of steel and a sword of iron, and to Saturn[72] a steel reaping-hook. His remark that at the feast of the gods the withered[73] part of a five-fingered branch should never be cut from the green part by black iron, shows that this metal was in common use, and that for religious ceremonies the older metal bronze retained its place.
Bronze was, however, a favourite metal with the poet, if not indeed in actual use long after iron was known,[74] for Pindar, about b.c. 470, still frequently cites spears and axes made of bronze.
By the time of Herodotus, who wrote before 400 b.c., the use of iron and steel was universal among the Greeks. He instances, as a fact worth recording, that the Massagetæ,[75] a powerful tribe which occupied the steppes on the east of the Caspian, made no use of iron or silver, but had an abundance of χαλκὸς and gold, pointing their spears and arrows and forming the heads of their battle-axes with the former metal. Among the Æthiopians,[76] on the contrary, he states that bronze was rarer and more precious than gold; nor was it in use among the Scythians.[77] The Sagartii[78] in the army of Xerxes are mentioned as not carrying arms either of bronze or iron except daggers, as if bronze were still of not unfrequent use.
Strabo,[79] at a much later date, thinks it worth while to record that among the Lusitanians the spears were tipped with bronze.