Homer and His Age

CHAPTER IX

Taking the Iliad and Odyssey just as they have reached us they give, with the exception of one line, an entirely harmonious account of the contemporary uses of bronze and iron. Bronze is employed in the making of weapons and armour (with cups, ornaments, &c.); iron is employed (and bronze is also used) in the making of tools and implements, such as knives, axes, adzes, axles of a chariot (that of Hera; mortals use an axle tree of oak), and the various implements of agricultural and pastoral life. Meanwhile, iron is a substance perfectly familiar to the poets; it is far indeed from being a priceless rarity (it is impossible to trace Homeric stages of advance in knowledge of iron), and it yields epithets indicating strength, permanence, and stubborn endurance. These epithets are more frequent in the Odyssey and the "later" Books of the Iliad than in the "earlier" Books of the Iliad; but, as articles made of iron, the Odyssey happens to mention only one set of axes, which is spoken of ten times – axes and adzes as a class – and "iron bonds," where "iron" probably means "strong," "not to be broken." {Footnote: In these circumstances, it is curious that Mr. Monro should have written thus: "In Homer, as is well known, iron is rarely mentioned in comparison with bronze, but the proportion is greater in the Odyssey (25 iron, 80 bronze) than in the Iliad" (23 iron, 279 bronze). – Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 339. These statistics obviously do not prove that, at the date of the composition of the Odyssey, the use of iron was becoming more common, or that the use of bronze was becoming more rare, than when the Iliad was put together. Bronze is, in the poems, the military metal: the Iliad is a military poem, while the Odyssey is an epic of peace; consequently the Iliad is much more copious in references to bronze than the Odyssey has any occasion to be. Wives are far more frequently mentioned in the Odyssey than in the Iliad, but nobody will argue that therefore marriage had recently come more into vogue. Again, the method of counting up references to iron in the Odyssey is quite misleading, when we remember that ten out of the twenty references are only one reference to one and the same set of iron tools-axes. Mr. Monro also proposed to leave six references to iron in the Iliad out of the reckoning, "as all of them are in lines which can be omitted without detriment to the sense." Most of the six are in a recurrent epic formula descriptive of a wealthy man, who possesses iron, as well as bronze, gold, and women. The existence of the formula proves familiarity with iron, and to excise it merely because it contradicts a theory is purely arbitrary. – Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 339.}. The statement of facts given here is much akin to Helbig's account of the uses of bronze and iron in Homer. {Footnote: Helbig, Das Homerischi Epos, pp. 330, 331. 1887.} Helbig writes: "It is notable that in the Epic there is much more frequent mention of iron implements than of iron weapons of war." He then gives examples, which we produce later, and especially remarks on what Achilles says when he offers a mass of iron as a prize in the funeral games of Patroclus. The iron, says Achilles, will serve for the purposes of the ploughman and shepherd, "a surprising speech from the son of Peleus, from whom we rather expect an allusion to the military uses of the metal." Of course, if iron weapons were not in vogue while iron was the metal for tools and implements, the words of Achilles are appropriate and intelligible.

The facts being as we and Helbig agree in stating them, we suppose that the Homeric poets sing of the usages of their own time. It is an age when iron, though quite familiar, is not yet employed for armour, or for swords or spears, which must be of excellent temper, without great weight in proportion to their length and size. Iron is only employed in Homer for some knives, which are never said to be used in battle (not even for dealing the final stab, like the mediaeval poniard, the miséricorde), for axes, which have a short cutting edge, and may be thick and weighty behind the edge, and for the rough implements of the shepherd and ploughman, such as tips of ploughshares, of goads, and so forth.

As far as archaeological excavations and discoveries enlighten us, these relative uses of bronze and iron did not exist in the ages of Mycenaean culture which are represented in the tholos of Vaphio and the graves, earlier and later, of Mycenae. Even in the later Mycenaean graves iron is found only in the form of finger rings (iron rings were common in late Greece). {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, pp. 72, 146, 165.} Iron was scarce in the Cypro-Mycenaean graves of Enkomi. A small knife with a carved handle had left traces of an iron blade. A couple of lumps of iron, one of them apparently the head of a club, were found in Schliemann's "Burned City" at Hissarlik; for the rest, swords, spear-heads, knives, and axes are all of bronze in the age called "Mycenaean." But we do not know whether iron implements may not yet be found in the sepulchres of Thetes, and other poor and landless men. The latest discoveries in Minoan graves in Crete exhibit tools of bronze.

Iron, we repeat, is in the poems a perfectly familiar metal. Ownership of "bronze, gold, and iron, which requires much labour" (in the smithying or smelting), appears regularly in the recurrent epic formula for describing a man of wealth. {Footnote: Iliad, VI. 48; IX. 365-366; X. 379; XI. 133; Odyssey, XIV. 324; XXI. 10.} Iron, bronze, slaves, and hides are bartered for sea-borne wine at the siege of Troy? {Footnote: Iliad, VII. 472-475.} Athene, disguised as Mentes, is carrying a cargo of iron to Temesa (Tamasus in Cyprus?), to barter for copper. The poets are certainly not describing an age in which only a man of wealth might indulge in the rare and extravagant luxury of an iron ring: iron was a common commodity, like cattle, hides, slaves, bronze, and other such matters. Common as it was, Homer never once mentions its use for defensive armour, or for swords and spears.

Only in two cases does Homer describe any weapon as of iron. There is to be sure the "iron," the knife with which Antilochus fears Achilles will cut his own throat. {Footnote: Iliad XVIII. 34.} But no knife is ever used as a weapon of war: knives are employed in cutting the throats of victims (see Iliad, III. 271 and XXIII. 30); the knife is said to be of iron, in this last passage; also Patroclus uses the knife to cut the arrow-head out of the flesh of a wounded friend. {Footnote: Iliad, XI. 844.} It is the knife of Achilles that is called "the iron," and on "the iron" perish the cattle in Iliad, XXIII. 30. Mr. Leaf says that by "the usual use, the metal" (iron) "is confined to tools of small size." {Footnote: Leaf, Iliad, xxiii. 30, Note.} This is incorrect; the Odyssey speaks of great axes habitually made of iron. {Footnote: Odyssey, IX. 391.} But we do find a knife of bronze, that of Agamemnon, used in sacrificing victims; at least so I infer from Iliad, III. 271-292.

The only two specimens of weapons named by Homer as of iron are one arrow-head, used by Pandarus, {Footnote: Iliad, IV. 123.} and one mace, borne, before Nestor's time, by Areithöus. To fight with an iron mace was an amiable and apparently unique eccentricity of Areithbus, and caused his death. On account of his peculiar practice he was named "The Mace man." {Footnote: Iliad, VII. 141.} The case is mentioned by Nestor as curious and unusual.

Mr. Leaf gets rid of this solitary iron casse tête in a pleasant way. Since he wrote his Companion to the Iliad, 1902, he has become converted, as we saw, to the theory, demolished by Mr. Monro, Nutzhorn, and Grote, and denounced by Blass, that the origin of our Homer is a text edited by some literary retainer of Pisistratus of Athens (about 560-540 B.C.). The editor arranged current lays, "altered" freely, and "wrote in" as much as he pleased. Probably he wrote this passage in which Nestor describes the man of the iron mace, for "the tales of Nestor's youthful exploits, all of which bear the mark of late work, are introduced with no special applicability to the context, but rather with the intention of glorifying the ancestor of Pisistratus."

{Footnote: Iliad (1900), VII. 149, Note.} If Pisistratus was pleased with the ancestral portrait, nobody has a right to interfere, but we need hardly linger over this hypothesis (cf. pp. 281-288).

Iron axes are offered as prizes by Achilles, {Footnote: Iliad, XXIII. 850.} and we have the iron axes of Odysseus, who shot an arrow through the apertures in the blades, at the close of the Odyssey.

But all these axes, as we shall show, were not weapons, but peacefulimplements.

As a matter of certain fact the swords and spears of Homer's warriors are invariably said by the poet to be of bronze, not of iron, in cases where the metal of the weapons is specified.

Except for an arrow-head (to which we shall return) and the one iron mace, noted as an eccentricity, no weapon in Homer is ever said to be of iron.

The richest men use swords of bronze. Not one chooses to indulge in a sword said to be of iron. The god, Hephaestus, makes a bronze sword for Achilles, whose own bronze sword was lent to Patroclus, and lost by him to Hector. {Footnote: Iliad XVI. 136; XIX. 372-373.} This bronze sword, at least, Achilles uses, after receiving the divine armour of the god. The sword of Paris is of bronze, as is the sword of Odysseus in the Odyssey. {Footnote: Iliad, III. 334-335} Bronze is the sword which he brought from Troy, and bronze is the sword presented to him by Euryalus in Phaeacia, and bronze is the spear with which he fought under the walls of Ilios. {Footnote: Odyssey, X. 162, 261-262} There are other examples of bronze swords, while spears are invariably said to be of bronze, when the metal of the spear is specified.

Here we are on the ground of solid certainty: we see that the Homeric warrior has regularly spear and sword of bronze. If any man used a spear or sword of iron, Homer never once mentions the fact. If the poets, in an age of iron weapons, always spoke of bronze, out of deference to tradition, they must have puzzled their iron-using military patrons.

Thus, as regards weapons, the Homeric heroes are in the age of bronze, like them who slept in the tombs of the Mycenaean age. When Homer speaks of the use of cutting instruments of iron, he is always concerned, except in the two cases given, not with {blank space} but with implements, which really were of iron. The wheelwright fells a tree "with the iron," that is, with an axe; Antilochus fears that Achilles "will cut his own throat with the iron," that is, with his knife, a thing never used in battle; the cattle struggle when slain with "the iron," that is, the butcher's knife; and Odysseus shoots "through the iron," that is, through the holes in the blade of the iron axes. {Footnote: For this peculiar kind of Mycenaean axe with holes in the blade, see the design of a bronze example from Vaphio in Tsountas and Manatt, The Mycenaean Age, p. 207, fig. 94.} Thus Homer never says that this or that was done "with the iron" in the case of any but one weapon of war. Pandarus "drew the bow-string to his breast and to the bow." {Footnote: Iliad, W. 123.} Whoever wrote that line was writing in an age, we may think, when arrow-heads were commonly of iron; but in Homer, when the metal of the arrow-head is mentioned, except, in this one case, it is always bronze. The iron arrow-tip of Pandarus was of an early type, the shaft did not run into the socket of the arrow-head; the tang of the arrow-head, on the other hand, entered the shaft, and was whipped on with sinew. {Iliad, IV. 151.} Pretty primitive this method, still the iron is an advance on the uniform bronze of Homer. The line about Pandarus and the iron arrow-head may really be early enough, for the arrow-head is of a primitive kind – socketless – and primitive is the attitude of the archer: he "drew the arrow to his breast." On the Mycenaean silver bowl, representing a siege, the archers draw to the breast, in the primitive style, as does the archer on the bronze dagger with a representation of a lion hunt. The Assyrians and Khita drew to the ear, as the monuments prove, and so does the "Cypro-Mycenaean" archer of the ivory draught-box from Enkomi. {Footnote: Evans, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xxx. p. 210.} In these circumstances we cannot deny that the poet may have known iron arrow-heads.

We now take the case of axes. We never hear from Homer of the use of an iron axe in battle, and warlike use of an axe only occurs twice. In Iliad, XV. 711, in a battle at and on the ships, "they were fighting with sharp axes and battle-axes" ({Greek text: axinai}) "and with great swords, and spears armed at butt and tip." At and on the ships, men would set hand to whatever tool of cutting edge was accessible. Seiler thinks that only the Trojans used the battle-axe; perhaps for damaging the ships: he follows the scholiast. {Greek text: Axinae}, however, {Footnote: Iliad, XIII. 611.} may perhaps be rendered "battle-axe," as a Trojan, Peisandros, fights with an {Greek text: Axinae}, and this is the only place in the Iliad, except XV. 711, where the thing is said to be used as a weapon. But it is not an iron axe; it is "of fine bronze." Only one bronze battle-axe, according to Dr. Joseph Anderson, is known to have been found in Scotland, though there are many bronze heads of axes which were tools.

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 implements of 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 inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation. In Homeric times the {Greek: chalceus} is already specialised as a worker in metals…" However, Homer does not say that the ploughman and shepherd "forge their own tools." A Homeric chief, far from a town, would have his own smithy, just as the laird of Runraurie (now Urrard) had his smithy at the time of the battle of Killicrankie (1689). Mackay's forces left their impedimenta "at the laird's smithy," says an eye-witness. {Footnote: Napier's Life Of Dundee, iii. p. 724.}

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 Nibelungenlied introduce chivalrous and Christian manners. They do not archaeologise. The poets of the French Chansons de Geste (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) bring their own weapons, and even armorial bearings, into the 'remote age of Charlemagne, which they know from legends and cantilènes. Again, the later remanieurs of the earliest Chansons de Geste modernise the details of these poems. But, per impossibile, and for the sake of argument, suppose that the later interpolators and continuators of the Homeric lays were antiquarian precisians, or, on the other hand, "deliberately attempted to reproduce from their inner consciousness an archaic state of civilisation." Suppose that, though they lived in an age of iron weapons, they knew, as Hesiod knew, that the old heroes "had warlike gear of bronze, and ploughed with bronze, and there was no black iron." {Footnote: Hesiod, Works and Days, pp. 250, 251.} In that case, why did the later interpolating poets introduce iron as the special material of tools and implements, knives and axes, in an age when they knew that there was no iron? Savants such as, by this theory, the later poets of the full-blown age of iron were, they must have known that the knives and axes of the old heroes were made of bronze. In old votive offerings in temples and in any Mycenaean graves which might be opened, the learned poets of 800-600 B.C. saw with their eyes knives and axes of bronze. {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, i. 413-416.} The knife of Agamemnon ({Greek: machaira}), which hangs from his girdle, beside his sword, {Footnote: Iliad, III. 271; XIX. 252.} corresponds to the knives found in Grave IV. at Mycenae; the handles of these dirks have a ring for suspension. {Footnote: Tsountas and Manatt, p. 204.} But these knives, in Mycenaean graves, are of bronze, and of bronze are the axes in the Mycenaean deposits and the dagger of Enkomi. {Footnote: Ibid., pp. 145, 207, 208, 256. Evans, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol xxx. p, 214.}

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 bronze in Iliad and Odyssey.

The usual process of transition from bronze to iron swords, in a prehistoric European age, is traced by Mr. Ridgeway at Hallstatt, "in the heart of the Austrian Alps," where a thousand old graves have been explored. The swords pass from bronze to iron with bronze hilts, and, finally, are wholly of iron. Weapons of bronze are fitted with iron edges. Axes of iron were much more common than axes of bronze. {Footnote: Early Age of Greece, i. 413-416.} The axes were fashioned in the old shapes of the age of bronze, were not of the bipennis Mycenaean model – the double axe – nor of the shape of the letter D, very thick, with two round apertures in the blade, like the bronze axe of Vaphio. {Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, vol. ii. 176.} Probably the axes through which Odysseus shot an arrow were of this kind, as Mr. Monro, and, much earlier, Mr. Butcher and I have argued. {Footnote: Ibid. (1901), vol. ii. Book XIX. line 572. Note. Butcher and Lang, Odyssey, Appendix (1891).}