CHAPTER XI.
THE SWORD IN ANCIENT GREECE: HOMER; HESIOD AND HERODOTUS: MYCENÆ.
‘Homer and Hesiod,’ says Herodotus,[715] ‘lived, as I hold, not more than four hundred years before my time.’ This would date them between b.c. 880–830. The contemporaneity of the bards, their cousinship, and even their existence, has been copiously doubted: some place Hesiod before, others two hundred or three hundred years after—
Blind Milesigenes thence Homer called;
and we have come to look upon Homer as one of the Homeridæ, the heros eponymus of the bards who produced the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’
Assuming, with Dr. Schliemann, the date of the Trojan war at about b.c. 1200,[716] Homer, according to the ‘Father of History,’ would flourish about four centuries and a half after the wars he sang.
‘I wish I could have proved Homer to have been an eye-witness of the Trojan war. Alas, I cannot do it! At his time swords were of universal use, and iron was known, whereas they were totally unknown at Troy.[717] Besides, the civilisation he describes is later by centuries than that which I have brought to light in the excavations. Homer gives us the legend of Ilium’s tragic fate as it was handed down to him by preceding bards, clothing the traditional facts of the war and destruction of Troy in the garb of his own day.’[718]
Metallurgically speaking, the sacred Bards and Heroes of Hellas, whose works formed the Holy Writ of Greece,[719] lived at the height of the Copper and in the beginning of the Iron Ages. Metal, not yet cast (χωνευτόν), would be worked in primitive fashion with the hammer (σφῦρα = σφυρήλατον),[720] and there were two manners of hammer-work, the Holosphyraton, in solid mass, and the Sphyraton or plate-work. Casting and soldering were invented (for the Greeks), according to Pausanias[721] and Pliny,[722] shortly after Homer’s day by the Samians Rhœcus and Theodorus. The latter, who lived between b.c. 800 and 700, may have introduced core-casting, so well known to Egypt and Assyria. The joints would be united by the normal mechanical means,[723] and the ornamental house-plates would be attached to the walls and floors with nails and studs. The idea of the firmament being a copper dome vault is known to Pindar as well as to the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’[724] Tartarus, below Hades,[725] had a similar threshold, and Atlas in Euripides had copper shoulders.[726]
Ornamentation (δαιδάλλειν) was applied with gravers, burins, and similar instruments; to domestic implements (cups and goblets, craters or bowls, cauldrons and tripods); to sacred vases for the temple; and to trumpets,[727] arms, and armour. Besides the brazier (χαλκεὺς) we find the gold caster (χρυσοχοός) who gilds the bull’s horns.[728]
The Homeric bards[729] and Hesiod are well acquainted with iron (σίδηρος),[730] and with steel in its various forms—Cyanus, Adámas, and Chalyps. The former mentions seven metals, the Haft-Júsh (‘seven boilings’), which he, like the Persians, had learned from Egypt. Quenching in water, or tempering, was well known to the ‘Odyssey,’ as we learn from the sputtering of Polyphemus’ eye[731]:—
And as when armourers temper in the ford