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Axes ({Greek text: pelekeis}) were implements, tools of the carpenter, woodcutter, shipwright, and so on; they were not weapons of war of the Achaeans.
As implements they are, with very rare exceptions, of iron. The wheelwright fells trees "with the gleaming iron," iron being a synonym for axe and for knife. {Footnote: Iliad, IV. 485} In Iliad, XIII. 391, the shipwrights cut timber with axes. In Iliad, XXIII. 114, woodcutters' axes are employed in tree-felling, but the results are said to be produced {Greek text: tanaaekei chalcho}, "by the long-edged bronze," where the word {Greek text: tanaaekaes} is borrowed from the usual epithet of swords; "the long edge" is quite inappropriate to a woodcutter's axe. On Calypso's isle Calypso gives to Odysseus a bronze axe for his raft-making. Butcher's work is done with an axe. {Footnote: Iliad, XVII. 520; Odyssey, III. 442-449.} The axes offered by Achilles as a prize for archers and the axes through which Odysseus shot are implementsof iron. {Footnote: Iliad, XXIII. 850; Odyssey, XXI. 3, 81, 97.}
In the Odyssey, when the poet describes the process of tempering iron, we read, "as when a smith dips a great axe or an adze in chill water, for thus men temper iron." {Footnote: Odyssey, IX. 391-393.} He is not using iron to make a sword or spear, but a tool-adze or axe. The poet is perfectly consistent. There are also examples both of bronze axes and, apparently, of bronze knives. Thus, though the woodcutter's or carpenter's axe is of bronze in two passages cited, iron is the usual material of the axe or adze. Again we saw, when Achilles gives a mass of iron as a prize in the games, he does not mean the armourer to fashion it into sword or spear, but says that it will serve the shepherd or ploughman for domestic implements, {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad(1902), XXIII. line 30, Note.} so that the men need not, on an upland farm, go to the city for iron implements. In commenting upon this Mr. Leaf is scarcely at the proper point of view. He says, {Footnote: Iliad, XXIII. 835, Note.} "the idea of a state of things when the ploughman and shepherd forge their own tools from a lump of raw iron has a suspicious appearance of a deliberate attempt to represent from the i
The idea of a late Homeric poet trying to reconstruct from his fancy a prehistoric state of civilisation is out of the question. Even historical novelists of the eighteenth century A.D. scarcely attempted such an effort.
This was the regular state of things in the Highlands during the eighteenth century, when many chiefs, and most of the clans, lived far from any town. But these rural smiths did not make sword-blades, which Prince Charles, as late as 1750, bought on the Continent. The Andrea Ferrara-marked broadsword blades of the clans were of foreign manufacture. The Highland smiths did such rough iron work as was needed for rural purposes. Perhaps the Homeric chief may have sometimes been a craftsman like the heroes of the Sagas, great sword-smiths. Odysseus himself, notably an excellent carpenter, may have been as good a sword-smith, but every hero was not so accomplished.
In searching with microscopes for Homeric discrepancies and interpolations, critics are apt to forget the ways of old rural society.
The Homeric poems, whether composed in one age or throughout five centuries, are thus entirely uniform in allotting bronze as the material for all sorts of warlike gear, down to the solitary battle-axe mentioned; and iron as the usual metal for heavy tools, knives, carpenters' axes, adzes, and agricultural implements, with the rare exceptions which we have cited in the case of bronze knives and axes. Either this distinction—iron for tools and implements; bronze for armour, swords, and spears—prevailed throughout the period of the Homeric poets or poet; or the poets invented such a stage of culture; or poets, some centuries later, deliberately kept bronze for weapons only, while introducing iron for implements. In that case they were showing archaeological conscientiousness in following the presumed earlier poets of the bronze age, the age of the Mycenaean graves.
Now early poets are never studious archaeologists. Examining the {blank space} certainly based on old lays and legends which survive in the Edda, we find that the poets of the Nibelungenliedintroduce chivalrous and Christian ma
Why, then, did the late poetic interpolators, who knew that the spears and swords of the old warriors were of bronze, and who describe them as of bronze, not know that their knives and axes were also of bronze? Why did they describe the old knives and axes as of iron, while Hesiod knew, and could have told them—did tell them, in fact—that they were of bronze? Clearly the theory that Homeric poets were archaeological precisians is impossible. They describe arms as of bronze, tools usually as of iron, because they see them to be such in practice.
The poems, in fact, depict a very extraordinary condition of affairs, such as no poets could invent and adhere to with uniformity. We are accustomed in archaeology to seeing the bronze sword pass by a gradual transition into the iron sword; but, in Homer, people with abundance of iron never, in any one specified case, use iron sword blades or spears. The greatest chiefs, men said to be rich in gold and iron, always use swords and spears of bronzein Iliadand Odyssey.