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 telamonor 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 passages 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.
{Illustration: 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'sExcavations, 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 thorex({Greek: thoraex}) is the verb {Greek: thoraesso, thoraessethai}, which means "to arm," or "equip" in general.
The Achaeans are constantly styled in the ILIADand 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 CHITONSin 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 chitonor 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 chitonof bronze." But that, if he lived in the Mycenaean age, when, so far as art shows, CHITONSwere 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 Hellenic 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 Hellenic 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.}