Part 6 (2/2)
Did these very late interlopers, down to the sixth century, introduce modern details into the picture of life? did they blur the _unus_ color?
We hope to prove that, if they did so at all, it was but slightly. That the poems, however, with a Mycenaean or sub-Mycenaean basis of actual custom and usage, contain numerous contaminations from the usage of centuries as late as the seventh, is the view of Mr. Leaf, and Reichel and his followers. [Footnote: Homerische Waffen. Von Wolfgang Reichel.
Wien, 1901.]
Reichel's hypothesis is that the heroes of the original poet had no defensive armour except the great Mycenaean s.h.i.+elds; that the ponderous s.h.i.+eld made the use of chariots imperatively necessary; that, after the Mycenaean age, a small buckler and a corslet superseded the unwieldy s.h.i.+eld; that chariots were no longer used; that, by the seventh century B.C., a warrior could not be thought of without a breastplate; and that new poets thrust corslets and greaves into songs both new and old.
How the new poets could conceive of warriors as always in chariots, whereas in practice they knew no war chariots, and yet could not conceive of them without corslets which the original poet never saw, is Reichel's secret. The new poets had in the old lays a plain example to follow. They did follow it as to chariots and s.h.i.+elds; as to corslets and greaves they reversed it. Such is the Reichelian theory.
THE s.h.i.+ELD
As regards armour, controversy is waged over the s.h.i.+eld, corslet, and bronze greaves. In Homer the s.h.i.+eld is of leather, plated with bronze, and of bronze is the corslet. No s.h.i.+elds of bronze plating and no bronze corslets have been found in Mycenaean excavations.
We have to ask, do the Homeric descriptions of s.h.i.+elds tally with the representations of s.h.i.+elds in works of art, discovered in the graves of Mycenae, Spata in Attica, Vaphio in Sparta, and elsewhere? If the descriptions in Homer vary from these relics, to what extent do they vary? and do the differences arise from the fact that the poet describes consistently what he sees in his own age, or are the variations caused by late rhapsodists in the Iron Age, who keep the great obsolete s.h.i.+elds and bronze weapons, yet introduce the other military gear of their day, say 800-600 B.C.--gear unknown to the early singers?
It may be best to inquire, first, what does the poet, or what do the poets, say about s.h.i.+elds? and, next, to examine the evidence of representations of s.h.i.+elds in Mycenaean art; always remembering that the poet does not pretend to live, and beyond all doubt does not live, in the Mycenaean prime, and that the testimony of the tombs is liable to be altered by fresh discoveries.
In _Iliad_, II. 388, the s.h.i.+eld (_aspis_) is spoken of as ”covering a man about” ([Greek: _amphibrotae_]), while, in the heat of battle, the baldric (_telamon_), or belt of the s.h.i.+eld, ”shall be wet with sweat.”
The s.h.i.+eld, then, is not an Ionian buckler worn on the left arm, but is suspended by a belt, and covers a man, or most of him, just as Mycenaean s.h.i.+elds are suspended by belts shown in works of art, and cover the body and legs. This (II. 388) is a general description applying to the s.h.i.+elds of all men who fight from chariots. Their great s.h.i.+eld answers to the great mediaeval s.h.i.+eld of the knights of the twelfth century, the ”double targe,” worn suspended from the neck by a belt. Such a s.h.i.+eld covers a mounted knight's body from mouth to stirrup in an ivory chessman of the eleventh to twelfth century A.D., [Footnote: _Catalogue of Scottish National Antiquities_, p. 375.] so also in the Bayeux tapestry, [Footnote: Gautier, _Chanson de Roland_. Seventh edition, pp.
393, 394.] and on seals. Dismounted men have the same s.h.i.+eld (p. 132).
The s.h.i.+eld of Menelaus (III. 348) is ”equal in all directions,” which we might conceive to mean, mathematically ”circular,” as the words do mean that. A s.h.i.+eld is said to have ”circles,” and a spear which grazes a s.h.i.+eld--a s.h.i.+eld which was _[Greek: panton eesae]_, ”every way equal”--rends both circles, the outer circle of bronze, and the inner circle of leather (_Iliad_, XX. 273-281). But the pa.s.sage is not unjustly believed to be late; and we cannot rely on it as proof that Homer knew circular s.h.i.+elds among others. The epithet _[Greek: eukuklykos]_, ”of good circle,” is commonly given to the s.h.i.+elds, but does not mean that the s.h.i.+eld was circular, we are told, but merely that it was ”made of circular plates.” [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p.
573.] As for the s.h.i.+eld of Menelaus, and other s.h.i.+elds described in the same words, ”every way equal,” the epithet is not now allowed to mean ”circular.” Mr. Leaf, annotating _Iliad_, I. 306, says that this sense is ”intolerably mathematical and prosaic,” and translates _[Greek: panton eesae]_ as ”well balanced on every side.” Helbig renders the epithets in the natural sense, as ”circular.” [Footnote: Helbig, _Homerische Epos_, p. 315; cf., on the other hand, p. 317, Note I.]
To the rendering ”circular” it is objected that a circular s.h.i.+eld of, say, four feet and a half in diameter, would be intolerably heavy and superfluously wide, while the s.h.i.+elds represented in Mycenaean art are not circles, but rather resemble a figure of eight, in some cases, or a section of a cylinder, in others, or, again, a door (Fig. 5, p. 130).
What Homer really meant by such epithets as ”equal every way,” ”very circular,” ”of a good circle,” cannot be ascertained, since Homeric epithets of the s.h.i.+eld, which were previously rendered ”circular,” ”of good circle,” and so on, are now translated in quite other senses, in order that Homeric descriptions may be made to tally with Mycenaean representations of s.h.i.+elds, which are never circular as represented in works of art. In this position of affairs we are unable to determine the shape, or shapes, of the s.h.i.+elds known to Homer.
A scholar's rendering of Homer's epithets applied to the s.h.i.+eld is obliged to vary with the variations of his theory about the s.h.i.+eld.
Thus, in 1883, Mr. Leaf wrote, ”The poet often calls the s.h.i.+eld by names which seem to imply that it was round, and yet indicates that it was large enough to cover the whole body of a man.... In descriptions the round shape is always implied.” The words which indicated that the s.h.i.+eld (or one s.h.i.+eld) ”really looked like a tower, and really reached from neck to ankles” (in two or three cases), were ”received by the poet from the earlier Achaean lays.” ”But to Homer the warriors appeared as using the later small round s.h.i.+eld. His belief in the heroic strength of the men of old time made it quite natural to speak of them as bearing a s.h.i.+eld which at once combined the later circular shape and the old heroic expanse....” [Footnote: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies, iv. pp._ 283-285.]
Here the Homeric words which naturally mean ”circular” or ”round” are accepted as meaning ”round” or ”circular.” Homer, it is supposed, in practice only knows the round s.h.i.+elds of the later age, 700 B.C., so he calls s.h.i.+elds ”round,” but, obedient to tradition, he conceives of them as very large.
But, after the appearance of Reichel's speculations, the Homeric words for ”round” and ”circular” have been explained as meaning something else, and Mr. Leaf, in place of maintaining that Homer knew no s.h.i.+elds but round s.h.i.+elds, now writes (1900), ”The small circular s.h.i.+eld of later times...is equally unknown to Homer, with a very few curious exceptions,” which Reichel discovered--erroneously, as we shall later try to show. [Footnote: Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 575.]
Thus does science fluctuate! Now Homer knows in practice none but light round bucklers, dating from about 700 B.C.; again, he does not know them at all, though they were habitually used in the period at which the later parts of his Epic were composed. We shall have to ask, how did small round bucklers come to be unknown to late poets who saw them constantly?
Some scholars, then, believe that the old original poet always described Mycenaean s.h.i.+elds, which are of various shapes, but never circular in Mycenaean art. If there are any circular s.h.i.+elds in the poems, these, they say, must have been introduced by poets accustomed, in a much later age, to seeing circular bucklers. Therefore Homeric words, hitherto understood as meaning ”circular,” must now mean something else--even if the reasoning seems circular.
Other scholars believe that the poet in real life saw various types of s.h.i.+elds in use, and that some of them were survivals of the Mycenaean s.h.i.+elds, semi-cylindrical, or shaped like figures of 8, or like a door; others were circular; and these scholars presume that Homer meant ”circular” when he said ”circular.” Neither school will convert the other, and we cannot decide between them. We do not pretend to be certain as to whether the original poet saw s.h.i.+elds of various types, including the round shape, in use, though that is possible, or whether he saw only the Mycenaean types.
As regards size, Homer certainly describes, in several cases, s.h.i.+elds very much larger than most which we know for certain to have been common after, say, 700 B.C. He speaks of s.h.i.+elds reaching from neck to ankles, and ”covering the body of a man about.” Whether he was also familiar with smaller s.h.i.+elds of various types is uncertain; he does not explicitly say that any small bucklers were used by the chiefs, nor does he explicitly say that all s.h.i.+elds were of the largest type. It is possible that at the time when the Epic was composed various types of s.h.i.+eld were being tried, while the vast ancient s.h.i.+eld was far from obsolete.
To return to the _size_ of the s.h.i.+eld. In a feigned tale of Odysseus (Odyssey, XIV. 474-477), men in a wintry ambush place their s.h.i.+elds over their shoulders, as they lie on the ground, to be a protection against snow. But any sort of s.h.i.+eld, large or small, would protect the shoulders of men in a rec.u.mbent position. Quite a large s.h.i.+eld may seem to be indicated in _Iliad_, XIII. 400-405, where Idomeneus curls up his whole person behind his s.h.i.+eld; he was ”hidden” by it. Yet, as any one can see by experiment, a man who crouched low would be protected entirely by a Highland targe of less than thirty inches in diameter, so nothing about the size of the s.h.i.+eld is ascertained in this pa.s.sage. On a black-figured vase in the British Museum (B, 325) the entire body of a crouching warrior is defended by a large Boeotian buckler, oval, and with _echancrures_ in the sides. The same remark applies to _Z&ad_[sic], XXII. 273-275. Hector watches the spear of Achilles as it flies; he crouches, and the spear flies over him. Robert takes this as an ”old Mycenaean” dodge--to duck down to the bottom of the s.h.i.+eld. [Footnote: _Studien zur Ilias_, p. 21.] The avoidance by ducking can be managed with no s.h.i.+eld, or with a common Highland targe, which would cover a man in a crouching posture, as when Glenbucket's targe was peppered by bullets at Clifton (746), and Cluny shouted ”What the devil is this?”
the a.s.sailants firing unexpectedly from a ditch. A few moments of experiment, we repeat, prove that a round targe can protect a man in Hector's att.i.tude, and that the Homeric texts here throw no light on the _size_ of the s.h.i.+eld.
The s.h.i.+eld of Hector was of black bull's-hide, and as large and long as any represented in Mycenaean art, so that, as he walked, the rim knocked against his neck and ankles. The shape is not mentioned. Despite its size, he _walked_ under it from the plain and field of battle into Troy (_Iliad_, VI. 116-118). This must be remembered, as Reichel [Footnote: Reichel, 38, 39. Father Browne (_Handbook_, p. 230) writes, ”In _Odyssey_, XIV 475, Odysseus says he slept within the s.h.i.+eld.” He says ”under arms” (_Odyssey_, XIV. 474, but _cf_. XIV. 479).] maintains that a man could not walk under s.h.i.+eld, or only for a short way; wherefore the war chariot was invented, he says, to carry the fighting man from point to point (Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 573). Mr. Leaf elaborates these points: ”Why did not the Homeric heroes ride? Because no man could carry such a s.h.i.+eld on horseback.” [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 573.]
We reply that men could and did carry such s.h.i.+elds on horseback, as we know on the evidence of works of art and poetry of the eleventh to twelfth centuries A.D. Mr. Ridgeway has explained the introduction of chariots as the result of horses too small to carry a heavy and heavily-armed man as a cavalier.
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