Homer and His Age

After writing this chapter, I observed that my opinion had been anticipated by S. H. Naber. {Footnote: Quaestiones Homericae, p. 60. Amsterdam. Van der Post, 1897.} "Quod Herodoti diserto testimonio novimus, Homeri restate ferruminatio nondum inventa erat necdum bene noverant mortales, uti opinor, acuereferrum. Hinc pauperes homines ubi possunt, ferro utuntur; sed in plerisque rebus turn domi turn militiae imprimis coguntur uti aere...."

The theory of Mr. Ridgeway as to the relative uses of iron and bronze is not, by myself, very easily to be understood. "The Homeric warrior ... has regularly, as we have seen, spear and sword of iron." {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 301.} As no spear or sword of iron is ever mentioned in the Iliador Odyssey, as both weapons are always of bronze when the metal is specified, I have not "seen" that they are "regularly," or ever, of iron. In proof, Mr. Ridgeway cites the axes and knives already mentioned—which are not spears or swords, and are sometimes of bronze. He also quotes the line in the Odyssey, "Iron of itself doth attract a man." But if this line is genuine and original, it does not apply to the state of things in the Iliad, while it contradicts the whole Odyssey, in which swords and spears are ALWAYSof bronze when their metal is mentioned. If the line reveals the true state of things, then throughout the Odyssey, if not throughout the Iliad, the poets when they invariably speak of bronze swords and spears invariably say what they do not mean. If they do this, how are we to know when they mean what they say, and of what value can their evidence on points of culture be reckoned? They may always be retaining traditional terms as to usages and customs in an age when these are obsolete.

If the Achaeans were, as in Mr. Ridgeway's theory, a northern people—"Celts"—who conquered with iron weapons a Pelasgian bronze-using Mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that Achaean or Pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional Pelasgian term for the metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who had won their triumph with iron. The traditional phrase of a conquered bronze-using race could not thus survive and flourish in the poetry of an outlandish iron-using race of conquerors.

Mr. Ridgeway cites the Odyssey, wherein we are told that "Euryalus, the Phaeacian, presented to Odysseus a bronze sword, though, as we have seen" (Mr. Ridgeway has seen), "the usual material for all such weapons is iron. But the Phoeacians both belonged to the older race and lived in a remote island, and therefore swords of bronze may well have continued in use in such out-of-the-world places long after iron swords were in use everywhere else in Greece. The man who could not afford iron had to be satisfied with bronze." {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, p. 305.} Here the poet is allowed to mean what he says. The Phaeacian sword is really of bronze, with silver studs, probably on the hilt (Odyssey, VIII. 401-407), which was of ivory. The "out-of-the-world" islanders could afford ivory, not iron. But when the same poet tells us that the sword which Odysseus brought from Troy was "a great silver-studded bronze sword" (Odyssey, X. 261, 262), then Mr. Ridgeway does not allow the poet to mean what he says. The poet is now using an epic formula older than the age of iron swords.

That Mr. Ridgeway adopts Helbig's theory—the poet says "bronze," by a survival of the diction of the bronze age, when he means iron—I infer from the following passage: " Chalkosis the name for the older metal, of which cutting weapons were made, and it thus lingered in many phrases of the Epic dialect; 'to smite with the chalkos' was equivalent to our phrase 'to smite with the steel.'" {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, i. 295.} But we certainly do smite with the steel, while the question is, " DIDHomer's men smite with the iron?" Homer says not; he does not merely use "an epic phrase" "to smite with the CHALKOS," but he carefully describes swords, spears, and usually arrow-heads as being of bronze ( CHALKOS), while axes, adzes, and knives are frequently described by him as of iron.

Mr. Ridgeway has an illustrative argument with some one, who says: "The dress and weapons of the Saxons given in the lay of Beowulffitted exactly the bronze weapons in England, for they had shields, and spears, and battle-axes, and swords." If you pointed out to him that the Saxon poem spoke of these weapons as made of iron, he would say, "I admit that it is a difficulty, but the resemblances are so many that the discrepancies may be jettisoned." {Footnote: Ridgeway,i. 83, 84.}

Now, if the supposed controversialist were a Homeric critic, he would not admit any difficulty. He would say, "Yes; in Beowulfthe weapons are said to be of iron, but that is the work of the Christian remanieur,or bearbeiter,who introduced all the Christian morality into the old heathen lay, and who also, not to puzzle his iron-using audience, changed the bronze into iron weapons."

We may prove anything if we argue, now that the poets retain the tradition of obsolete things, now that they modernise as much as they please. Into this method of reasoning, after duly considering it, I am unable to come with enthusiasm, being wedded to the belief that the poets say what they mean. Were it otherwise, did they not mean what they say, their evidence would be of no value; they might be dealing throughout in terms for things which were unrepresented in their own age. To prove this possible, it would be necessary to adduce convincing and sufficient examples of early national poets who habitually use the terminology of an age long prior to their own in descriptions of objects, customs, and usages. Meanwhile, it is obvious that my whole argument has no archaeological support. We may find "Mycenaean" corslets and greaves, but they are not in cremation burials. No Homeric cairn with Homeric contents has ever been discovered; and if we did find examples of Homeric cairns, it appears, from the poems, that they would very seldom contain the arms of the dead.

Nowhere, again, do we find graves containing bronze swords and iron axes and adzes. I know nothing nearer in discoveries to my supposed age of bronze weapons and iron tools than a grave of the early iron and geometrical ornament age of Crete—a tholostomb, with a bronze spear-head and a set of iron tools, among others a double axe and a pick of iron. But these were in company with iron swords? To myself the crowning mystery is, what has become of the Homeric tumuli with their contents? One can but say that only within the last thirty years have we found, or, finding, have recognised Mycenaean burial records. As to the badness of the iron of the North for military purposes, and the probable badness of all early iron weapons, we have testimony two thousand years later than Homer and some twelve hundred years later than Polybius. In the Eyrbyggja Saga (Morris and Maguъsson, chap, xxiv.) we read that Steinthor "was girt with a sword that was cu