Homer and His Age

These Iroquois and Algonquin shields are the armour of men exposed, not to spears, but to a hail of flint-tipped arrows. As spears came in for missiles in Greek warfare, arrows did not wholly go out, but the noble warriors preferred spear and sword. {Footnote: Cf. Archilochus, 3.} Mr. Ridgeway erroneously says that "no Achaean warrior employs the bow for war." {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, i. 301.} Teucer, frequently, and Meriones use the bow; like Pandarus and Paris, on the Trojan side, they resort to bow or spear, as occasion serves. Odysseus, in Iliad, Book X., is armed with the bow and arrows of Meriones when acting as a spy; in the Odysseyhis skill as an archer is notorious, but he would not pretend to equal famous bowmen of an older generation, such as Heracles and Eurytus of OEchalia, whose bow he possessed but did not take to Troy. Philoctetes is his master in archery. {Footnote: Odyssey, VIII. 219-222.}

{Illustration: FIG. 7. FRAGMENT OF SIEGE VASE}

The bow, however, was little esteemed by Greek warriors who desired to come to handstrokes, just as it was despised, to their frequent ruin, by the Scots in the old wars with England. Dupplin, Falkirk, Halidon Hill and many another field proved the error.

There was much need in Homeric warfare for protection against heavy showers of arrows. Mr. Monro is hardly correct when he says that, in Homer, "we do not hear of BODIESof archers, of arrows darkening the air, as in descriptions of oriental warfare." {Footnote: Ibid., vol. ii. 305.} These precise phrases are not used by Homer; but, nevertheless, arrows are flying thick in his battle pieces. The effects are not often noticed, because, in Homer, helmet, shield, corslet, zoster, and greaves, as a rule prevent the shafts from harming the well-born, well-armed chiefs; the nameless host, however, fall frequently. When Hector came forward for a parley ( Iliad, III. 79), the Achaens "kept shooting at him with arrows," which he took unconcernedly. Teucer shoots nine men in Iliad, VIII. 297-304. In XI. 85the shafts ({Greek: belea}) showered and the common soldiers fell—{misprint} being arrows as well as thrown spears. {Footnote: Iliad, IV. 465; XVI. 668, 678.} Agamemnon and Achilles are as likely, they say, to be hit by arrow as by spear (XI. 191; XXI. 13). Machaon is wounded by an arrow. Patroclus meets Eurypylus limping, with an arrow in his thigh—archer unknown. {Footnote: Iliad, XI. 809, 810.} Meriones, though an Achaean paladin, sends a bronze-headed arrow through the body of Harpalion (XIII. 650). The light-armed Locrians are all bowmen and slingers (XIII. 716). Acamas taunts the Argives as "bowmen" (XIV. 479). "The war-cry rose on both sides, and the arrows leaped from the bowstrings" (XV. 313). Manifestly the arrows are always on the wing, hence the need for the huge Homeric and Mycenaean shields. Therefore, as the Achaeans in Homer wore but flimsy corslets (this we are going to prove), the great body-covering shield of the Mycenaean prime did not go out of vogue in Homer's time, when bronze had superseded stone arrow-heads, but was strengthened by bronze plating over the leather. In a later age the bow was more and more neglected in Greek warfare, and consequently large shields went out, after the close of the Mycenaean age, and round parrying bucklers came into use.

The Greeks appear never to have been great archers, for some vases show even the old heroes employing the "primary release," the arrow nock is held between the thumb and forefinger—an ineffectual release. {Footnote: C. J. Longman, Archery. Badminton Series.} The archers in early Greek art often stoop or kneel, unlike the erect archers of old England; the bow is usually small—a child's weapon; the string is often drawn only to the breast, as by Pandarus in the Iliad(IV. i 23). By 730 B.C. the release with three fingers, our western release, had become known. {Footnote: Leaf Iliad, vol. i. p. 585.}

{Illustration: FIG. 8.—ALGONQUIN CORSLET. From Laverdiere, Oeuvres de Champlain, vol. iv. fol. 4. Quebec, 1870.}

The course of evolution seems to be: (1) the Mycenaean prime of much archery, no body armour (?); huge leather "man-covering" shields are used, like those of the Algonquins; (2) the same shields strengthened with metal, light body armour-thin corslets—and archery is frequent, but somewhat despised (the Homeric age); (3) the parrying shield of the latest Mycenaean age (infantry with body armour); (4) the Ionian hoplites, with body armour and small circular bucklers.

It appears, then, that the monstrous Mycenaean shield is a survival of an age when bows and arrows played the same great part as they did in the wars of the Algonquins and Iroquois. The celebrated picture of a siege on a silver vase, of which fragments were found in Grave IV., shows archers skirmishing; there is an archer in the lion hunt on the dagger blade; thirty-five obsidian arrow-heads were discovered in Grave IV., while "in the upper strata of Mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze, though instances of obsidian still occur." In 1895 Dr. Tsountas found twenty arrow-heads of bronze, ten in each bundle, in a Mycenaean chamber tomb. Messrs. Tsountas and Manatt say, "In the Acropolis graves at Mycenae... the spear-heads were but few... arrow-heads, on the contrary, are comparatively abundant." They infer that "picked men used shield and spear; the rank and file doubtless fought simply with bow and sling." {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, zog. {sic}}. The great Mycenaean shield was obviously evolved as a defence against arrows and sling-stones flying too freely to be parried with a small buckler. What other purpose could it have served? But other defensive armour was needed, and was evolved, by Homer's men, as also, we shall see, by the Algonquins and Iroquois. The Algonquins and Iroquois thus prove that men who thought their huge shields very efficient, yet felt the desirableness of the protection afforded by corslets, for they wore, in addition to their shields, such corslets as they were able to manufacture, made of cotton, and corresponding to the Homeric {Greek: linothoraex}. {Footnote: In the interior of some shields, perhaps of all, were two {Greek: kanones} (VIII 193; XIII. 407). These have been understood as meaning a brace through which the left arm went, and another brace which the left hand grasped. Herodotus says that the Carians first used shield grips, and that previously shields were suspended by belts from the neck and left shoulder (Herodotus, i. 171). It would be interesting to know how he learned these facts-perhaps from Homer; but certainly the Homeric shield is often described as suspended by a belt. Mr. Leaf used to explain the {Greek: kanones} (XIII. 407) as "serving to attach the two ends of the baldrick to the shield" ( HellenicSociety's Journal, iv. 291), as does Mr. Ridgeway. But now he thinks that they were two pieces of wood, crossing each other, and making the framework on which the leather of the shield was stretched. The hero could grasp the cross-bar, at the centre of gravity, in his left hand, rest the lower rim of the shield on the ground, and crouch behind it (XI. 593; XIII 157). In neither passage cited is anything said about resting the lower rim "on the ground," and in the second passage the warrior is actually advancing. In this attitude, however-grounding the lower rim of the great body-covering shield, and crouching behind it—we see Algonquin warriors of about 1610 in Champlain's drawings of Red Indian warfare.}

Mr. Leaf, indeed, when reviewing Reichel, says that "the use of the Mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; 'the shield' covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." {Footnote: Classical Review, ix. p. 55. 1895.}