Homer and His Age Part 8

3) shows a man with a shield, possibly evolved out of this kind, much scooped out at the waist, and reaching from neck to knees. The shield covers his side, not his back or front. [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, vol. xiii. pp. 21-24.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 4.]

One may guess that the original pinch at the waist of the Mycenaean shield was evolved later into the two deep scoops to enable the warrior to use his arms more freely, while the shield, hanging from his neck by a belt, covered the front of his body. Fig. 4 shows shields of 1060-1160 A.D. equally designed to cover body and legs. Men wore shields, if we believe the artists of Mycenae, when lion-hunting, a sport in which speed of foot is desirable; so they cannot have been very weighty.

The shield then was hung over one side, and running was not so very difficult as if it hung over back or front (_cf._ Fig. 5). The shields sometimes reach only from the shoulders to the calf of the leg.

[Footnote: Reichel, p. 3, fig. 5, Grave III. at Mycenae.] The wearer of the largest kind could only be got at by a sword-stab over the rim into the throat [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 2, fig. 2.] (Fig. 5). Some shields of this shape were quite small, if an engraved rock-crystal is evidence; here the shield is not half so high as an adjacent goat, but it may be a mere decoration to fill the field of the gem. [Footnote: Reichel, p. 3, fig. 7.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 5. RINGS: SWORDS AND SHIELDS]

Other shields, covering the body from neck to feet, were sections of cylinders; several of these are represented on engraved Mycenaean ring stones or on the gold; the wearer was protected in front and flank [Footnote: _Ibid._, p. 4, fig II, 12; p. I, fig I.] (Fig. 5).

In a "maze of buildings" outside the precincts of the graves of Mycenae, Dr. Schliemann found fragments of vases much less ancient than the contents of the sepulchres. There was a large amphora, the "Warrior Vase" (Fig. 6). The men wear apparently a close-fitting coat of mail over a chiton, which reaches with its fringes half down the thigh. The shield is circular, with a half-moon cut out at the bottom. The art is infantile. Other warriors carry long oval shields reaching, at least, from neck to shin. [Footnote: Schuchardt, _Schliemann's_ Excavations, pp. 279-285.] They wear round leather caps, their enemies have helmets.

On a Mycenaean painted _stele_, apparently of the same relatively late period, the costume is similar, and the shield--oval--reaches from neck to knee. [Footnote: Ridgeway, vol. i. p. 314.] The Homeric shields do not answer to the smaller of these late and ugly representations, while, in their bronze plating, Homeric shields seem to differ from the leather shields of the Mycenaean prime.

Finally, at Enkomi, near Salamis, in Cyprus, an ivory carving (in the British Museum) shows a fighting man whose perfectly circular shield reaches from neck to knee; this is one of several figures in which Mr.

Arthur Evans finds "a most valuable ill.u.s.tration of the typical Homeric armour." [Footnote: _Journal of the Anthropological Inst.i.tute, vol. x.x.x.

pp. 209-214, figs. 5, 6, 9._] The shield, however, is not so huge as those of Aias, Hector, and Periphetes.

I can only conclude that Homer describes intermediate types of shield, as large as the Mycenaean but plated with bronze, for a reason to be given later. This kind of shield, the kind known to Homer, was not the invention of late poets living in an age of circular bucklers, worn on the left arm, and these supposed late poets never introduce into the epics such bucklers.

What manner of military needs prompted the invention of the great Mycenaean shields which, by Homer's time, were differentiated by the addition of metal plating?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6. FRAGMENTS OF WARRIOR VASE]

The process of evolution of the huge Mycenaean shields, and of the Homeric shields covering the body from chin to ankles, can easily be traced. The nature of the attack expected may be inferred from the nature of the defence employed. Body-covering shields were, obviously, at first, _defences against showers of arrows_ tipped with stone. "In the earlier Mycenaean times the arrow-head of obsidian alone appears,"

as in Mycenaean Grave IV. In the upper strata of Mycenae and in the later tombs the arrow-head is usually of bronze. [Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 206.] No man going into battle naked, without body armour, like the Mycenaeans (if they had none), could protect himself with a small shield, or even with a round buckler of twenty-six inches in diameter, against the rain of shafts. In a fight, on the other hand, where man singled out man, and spears were the missiles, and when the warriors had body armour, or even when they had not, a small shield sufficed; as we see among the spear-throwing Zulus and the spear-throwing aborigines of Australia (unacquainted with bows and arrows), who mainly use shields scarcely broader than a bat. On the other hand, the archers of the Algonquins in their wars with the Iroquois, about 1610, used clubs and tomahawks but no spears, no missiles but arrows, and their leather shield was precisely the [Greek: amphibrotae aspis] of Homer, "covering the whole of a man." It is curious to see, in contemporary drawings (1620), Mycenaean shields on Red Indian shoulders!

In Champlain's sketches of fights between French and Algonquins against Iroquois (1610-1620), we see the Algonquins outside the Iroquois stockade, which is defended by archers, sheltering under huge shields shaped like the Mycenaean "tower" shield, though less cylindrical; in fact, more like the shield of the fallen hunter depicted on the dagger of Mycenae. These Algonquin shields partially cover the sides as well as the front of the warrior, who stoops behind them, resting the lower rim of the shield on the ground. The shields are oblong and rounded at the top, much like that of Achilles [Footnote: Iliad, vol. ii p. 605] in Mr. Leaf's restoration? The sides curve inward. Another shield, oval in shape and flat, appears to have been suspended from the neck, and covers an Iroquois brave from chin to feet. The Red Indian shields, like those of Mycenae, were made of leather; usually of buffalo hide, [Footnote: _Les Voyages de Sr. de Champlain_, Paris, 1620, f. 22: "rondache de cuir bouili, qui est d'un animal, comme le boufle."] good against stone-tipped arrows. The braves are naked, like the unshielded archers on the Mycenaean silver vase fragment representing a siege (Fig. 7). The description of the Algonquin shields by Champlain, when compared with his drawings, suggests that we cannot always take artistic representations as exact. In his designs only a few Algonquins and one Iroquois carry the huge shields; the unshielded men are stark naked, as on the Mycenaean silver vase. But in his text Champlain says that the Iroquois, like the Algonquins, "carried arrow-proof shields" and "a sort of armour woven of cotton thread"--Homer's [Greek: linothoraex]

(_Iliad_, II. 259, 850). These facts appear in only one of Champlain's drawings [Footnote: Dix's _Champlain_, p. 113. Appleton, New York, 1903.

Laverdiere's _Champlain_, vol. iv., plate opposite p. 85 (1870).] (Fig.

8).

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 n.o.ble 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 _Odyssey_ his 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.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 _BODIES_ of 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. _85_ the 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.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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" (_h.e.l.lenic_ Society'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 pa.s.sage cited is anything said about resting the lower rim "on the ground,"

and in the second pa.s.sage the warrior is actually advancing. In this att.i.tude, 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 enc.u.mbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully c.u.mbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: _Cla.s.sical Review_, ix. p. 55. 1895.]

But the Algonquins and Iroquois wore such breastplates as they could manufacture, though they also used shields of great size, suspended, in Mycenaean fashion, from the neck and shoulder by a _telamon_ or belt.

The knights of the eleventh century A.D., in addition to very large shields, wore ponderous hauberks or byrnies, as we shall prove presently. As this combination of great shield with corslet was common and natural, we cannot agree with Mr. Leaf when he says, "it follows that the Homeric warriors wore no metal breastplate, and that all the pa.s.sages where the [Greek: thoraes] is mentioned are either later interpolations or refer to some other sort of armour," which, _ex hypothesi_, would itself be superfluous, given the body-covering shield.

Shields never make corslets superfluous when men can manufacture corslets.

The facts speak for themselves: the largest shields are not exclusive, so to speak, of corslets; the Homeric warriors used both, just as did Red Indians and the mediaeval chivalry of Europe. The use of the aspis in Homer, therefore, throws no suspicion on the concomitant use of the corslet. The really surprising fact would be if late poets, who knew only small round bucklers, never introduced them into the poems, but always spoke of enormous shields, while they at the same time did introduce corslets, unknown to the early poems which they continued.

Clearly Reichel's theory is ill inspired and inconsistent. This becomes plain as soon as we trace the evolution of shields and corslets in ages when the bow played a great part in war. The Homeric bronze-plated shield and bronze corslet are defences of a given moment in military evolution; they are improvements on the large leather shield of Mycenaean art, but, as the arrows still fly in clouds, the time for the small parrying buckler has not yet come.

By the age of the Dipylon vases with human figures, the shield had been developed into forms unknown to Homer. In Fig. 3 (p. 131) we see one warrior with a fantastic shield, slim at the waist, with horns, as it were, above and below; the greater part of the shield is expended uselessly, covering nothing in particular. In form this targe seems to be a burlesque parody of the figure of a Mycenaean shield. The next man has a short oblong shield, rather broad for its length--perhaps a reduction of the Mycenaean door-shaped shield. The third warrior has a round buckler. All these shields are manifestly post-Homeric; the first type is the most common in the Dipylon art; the third survived in the eighth-century buckler.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 9.-GOLD CORSLET]

CHAPTER VIII

THE BREASTPLATE

No "practicable" breastplates, hauberks, corslets, or any things of the kind have so far been discovered in graves of the Mycenaean prime. A corpse in Grave V. at Mycenae had, however, a golden breastplate, with oval bosses representing the nipples and with prettily interlaced spirals all over the remainder of the gold (Fig. 9). Another corpse had a plain gold breastplate with the nipples indicated. [Footnote: Schuchardt, _Schliemann's_ Excavations, pp. 254-257, fig. 256.]

These decorative corslets of gold were probably funereal symbols of practicable breastplates of bronze, but no such pieces of armour are worn by the fighting-men on the gems and other works of art of Mycenae, and none are found in Mycenaean graves. But does this prove anything?

Leg-guards, broad metal bands clasping the leg below the knee, are found in the Mycenaean shaft graves, but are never represented in Mycenaean art. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.] Meanwhile, bronze corslets are very frequently mentioned in the "rarely alluded to," says Mr. Leaf, [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 576.] but this must be a slip of the pen. Connected with the breastplate or _th.o.r.ex_ ([Greek: thoraex]) is the verb [Greek: thoraesso, thoraessethai], which means "to arm," or "equip" in general.

The Achaeans are constantly styled in the _ILIAD_ and in the _ODYSSEY_ "_chalkochitones_," "with bronze chitons." epics have therefore boldly argued that by "bronze chitons" the poet pleasantly alludes to shields.

But as the Mycenaeans seem scarcely to have worn any _CHITONS_ in battle, as far as we are aware from their art, and are not known to have had any bronze shields, the argument evaporates, as Mr. Ridgeway has pointed out. Nothing can be less like a _chiton_ or smock, loose or tight, than either the double-bellied huge shield, the tower-shaped cylindrical shield, or the flat, doorlike shield, covering body and legs in Mycenaean art. "The bronze _chiton_," says Helbig, "is only a poetic phrase for the corslet."

Reichel and Mr. Leaf, however, think that "bronze chitoned" is probably "a picturesque expression... and refers to the bronze-covered shield."

[Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, i. 578.] The breastplate covered the upper part of the _chiton_, and so might be called a "bronze _chiton_," above all, if it had been evolved, as corselets usually have been, out of a real _chiton_, interwoven with small plates or rings of bronze. The process of evolution might be from a padded linen _chiton_ ([Greek: linothooraes]) worn by Teucer, and on the Trojan side by Amphius (as by nervous Protestants during Oates's "Popish Plot"), to a leathern _chiton_, strengthened by rings, or studs, or scales of bronze, and thence to plates. [Footnote: Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i.

pp. 309, 310.] Here, in this armoured _chiton_, would be an object that a poet might readily call "a _chiton_ of bronze." But that, if he lived in the Mycenaean age, when, so far as art shows, _CHITONS_ were not worn at all, or very little, and scarcely ever in battle, and when we know nothing of bronze-plating on shields, the poet should constantly call a monstrous double-bellied leather shield, or any other Mycemean type of shield, "a _bronze chiton_," seems almost unthinkable. "A leather cloak"

would be a better term for such shields, if cloaks were in fashion.

According to Mr. Myres (1899) the "stock line" in the _Iliad_, about piercing a [Greek: poludaidalos thoraex] or corslet, was inserted "to satisfy the practical criticisms of a corslet-wearing age," the age of the later poets, the Age of Iron. But why did not such practical critics object to the constant presence in the poems of bronze weapons, in their age out of date, if they objected to the absence from the poems of the corslets with which they were familiar? Mr. Myres supposes that the line about the [Greek: poludaidalos] corslet was already old, but had merely meant "many-glittering body clothing"--garments set with the golden discs and other ornaments found in Mycemean graves. The bronze corslet, he says, would not be "many glittering," but would reflect "a single star of light." [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies._ 1899] Now, first, even if the star were a single star, it would be as "many glittering" when the warrior was in rapid and changeful motion as the star that danced when Beatrix was born. Secondly, if the contemporary corslets of the Iron Age were NOT "many glittering," practical corslet-wearing critics would ask the poet, "why do you call corslets 'many glittering'?" Thirdly, [Greek: poludaidalos] may surely be translated "a thing of much art," and Greek corslets were incised with ornamental designs. Thus Messrs. Hogarth and Bosanquet report "a very remarkable 'Mycemean' bronze breastplate" from Crete, which "shows four female draped figures, the two central ones holding a wreath over a bird, below which is a sacred tree. The two outer figures are apparently dancing. It is probably a ritual scene, and may help to elucidate the nature of early AEgean cults." [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies, vol. xx_. p. 322. 1899.] Here, [Greek: poludaidalos]--if that word means "artistically wrought." Helbig thinks the Epics silent about the gold spangles on dresses. [Footnote: Helbig, p. 71.]

Mr. Myres applauds Reichel's theory that [blank s.p.a.ce] first meant a man's chest. If _th.o.r.ex_ means a man's breast, then _Th.o.r.eX_ in a secondary sense, one thinks, would mean "breastplate," as waist of a woman means, first, her waist; next, her blouse (American). But Mr.

Myres and Reichel say that the secondary sense of _Th.o.r.eX_ is not breastplate but "body clothing," as if a man were all breast, or wore only a breast covering, whereas Mycenaean art shows men wearing nothing on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, merely drawers or loin-cloths, which could not be called _Th.o.r.eX_, as they cover the antipodes of the breast.

The verb [Greek: thoraesestai], the theory runs on, merely meant "to put on body clothing," which Mycenaeans in works of art, if correctly represented, do not usually put on; they fought naked or in bathing drawers. Surely we might as well argue that a "waistcoat" might come to mean "body clothing in general," as that a word for the male breast became, first, a synonym for the covering of the male b.u.t.tocks and for apparel in general, and, next, for a bronze breastplate. These arguments appear rather unconvincing, [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, vol. xx. pp. 149, 150.] nor does Mycenaean art instruct us that men went into battle dressed in body clothing which was thickly set with many glittering gold ornaments, and was called "a many-glittering _th.o.r.ex_."