Homer and His Age

We have now tried to show that, as regards (1) to the absence from Homer of new religious and ritual ideas, or of very old ideas revived in Ionia, (2) as concerns the clear conception of a loose form of feudalism, with an Over-Lord, and (3) in the matter of burial, the Iliadand Odyssey are self-consistent, and bear the impress of a single and peculiar moment of culture.

The fact, if accepted, is incompatible with the theory that the poets both introduced the peculiar conditions of their own later ages and also, on other occasions, consciously and consistently "archaised." Not only is such archaising inconsistent with the art of an uncritical age, but a careful archaiser, with all the resources of Alexandrian criticism at his command, could not archaise successfully. We refer to Quintus Smyrnaeus, author of the Post Homerica, in fourteen books. Quintus does his best; but we never observe in him that naпfdelight in describing weapons and works of art, and details of law and custom which are so conspicuous in Homer and in other early poets. He does give us Penthesilea's great sword, with a hilt of ivory and silver; but of what metal was the blade? We are not told, and the reader of Quintus will observe that, though he knows {Greek: chalkos}, bronze, as a synonym for weapons, he scarcely ever, if ever, says that a sword or spear or arrow-head was of bronze—a point on which Homer constantly insists. When he names the military metal Quintus usually speaks of iron. He has no interest in the constitutional and legal sides of heroic life, so attractive to Homer.

Yet Quintus consciously archaises, in a critical age, with Homer as his model. Any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the ILIADmust have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the Border ballads. If he succeeds in producing nothing that will at once mark his work as modern, he will be more successful than any poet who has made the experiment, and more successful than the most ingenious modern forgers of gems, jewels, and terra-cottas. They seldom deceive experts, and, when they do, other experts detect the deceit.

CHAPTER VII

HOMERIC ARMOUR

Tested by their ideas, their picture of political society, and their descriptions of burial rites, the presumed authors of the alleged expansions of the Iliadall lived in one and the same period of culture. But, according to the prevalent critical theory, we read in the Iliadnot only large "expansions" of many dates, but also briefer interpolations inserted by the strolling reciters or rhapsodists. "Until the final literary redaction had come," says Mr. Leaf—that is about 540 B.C.—"we ca

Here we are far from Mr. Leaf's own opinion that "the whole scenery of the poems, the details of armour, palaces, dress, decoration ... had become stereotyped, and formed a foundation which the Epic poet dared not intentionally sap...." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. i. p. xv.} We now find {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. p. ix.} that "the latest poet" saps as much as he pleases down to the middle of the sixth century B.C. Moreover, in the middle of the sixth century B.C., the supposed editor employed by Hsistratus made "constant additions of transitional passages," and added many speeches by Nestor, an ancestor of Pisistratus.

Did these very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the unuscolor? We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, and Reichel and his followers. {Footnote: Homerische Waffen. Von Wolfgang Reichel. Wien, 1901.}

Reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no defensive armour except the great Mycenaean shields; that the ponderous shield made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the Mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy shield; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century B.C., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old.

How the new poets could conceive of warriors as always in chariots, whereas in practice they knew no war chariots, and yet could not conceive of them without corslets which the original poet never saw, is Reichel's secret. The new poets had in the old lays a plain example to follow. They did follow it as to chariots and shields; as to corslets and greaves they reversed it. Such is the Reichelian theory.

THE SHIELD

As regards armour, controversy is waged over the shield, corslet, and bronze greaves. In Homer the shield is of leather, plated with bronze, and of bronze is the corslet. No shields of bronze plating and no bronze corslets have been found in Mycenaean excavations.

We have to ask, do the Homeric descriptions of shields tally with the representations of shields in works of art, discovered in the graves of Mycenae, Spata in Attica, Vaphio in Sparta, and elsewhere? If the descriptions in Homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused by late rhapsodists in the Iron Age, who keep the great obsolete shields and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day, say 800-600 B.C.—gear unknown to the early singers?

It may be best to inquire, first, what does the poet, or what do the poets, say about shields? and, next, to examine the evidence of representations of shields in Mycenaean art; always remembering that the poet does not pretend to live, and beyond all doubt does not live, in the Mycenaean prime, and that the testimony of the tombs is liable to be altered by fresh discoveries.

In Iliad, II. 388, the shield ( aspis) is spoken of as "covering a man about" ({Greek: amphibrotae}), while, in the heat of battle, the baldric ( telamon), or belt of the shield, "shall be wet with sweat." The shield, then, is not an Ionian buckler worn on the left arm, but is suspended by a belt, and covers a man, or most of him, just as Mycenaean shields are suspended by belts shown in works of art, and cover the body and legs. This (II. 388) is a general description applying to the shields of all men who fight from chariots. Their great shield answers to the great mediaeval shield of the knights of the twelfth century, the "double targe," worn suspended from the neck by a belt. Such a shield covers a mounted knight's body from mouth to stirrup in an ivory chessman of the eleventh to twelfth century A.D., {Footnote: Catalogue of Scottish National Antiquities, p. 375.} so also in the Bayeux tapestry, {Footnote: Gautier, Chanson de Roland. Seventh edition, pp. 393, 394.} and on seals. Dismounted men have the same shield (p. 132).

The shield of Menelaus (III. 348) is "equal in all directions," which we might conceive to mean, mathematically "circular," as the words do mean that. A shield is said to have "circles," and a spear which grazes a shield—a shield which was {Greek: panton eesae}, "every way equal"—rends both circles, the outer circle of bronze, and the i